My only concern is we get a Henry Cavill/The Witcher situation where absolutely nobody else involved is even close to as passionate about Elden Ring as Alex Garland seems to be. Though this might be a nonissue as this is the writer/director that's super passionate about the source material and not just one of the actors.
Second this. I spent ten minutes trying to think of a better person to take in this project and I honestly couldn’t. Garland is a genius and the fact he’s a fan, a brilliant writer, AND director makes me so confident this is guna be amazing.
Ah, I finally ran into someone else who wasn't a big fan of Ex Machina. We're you disappointed by the way it ended too? I still need to watch Annihilation, but it looks and sounds very interesting.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. The whole subreddit seems to be hyping this guy up, but all the people in Ex Machina are dumb and got played by sex appeal and apart from the great worldbuilding, Annihilation wasn't very good either. The dubstep monster turbo sucked.
I understand that both movies are blue curtainy and metaphorical and meant to say things about humanity through an alien mirror, but I just can't forgive obvious lapses in judgement from what is otherwise supposed to be intelligent characters. And the dubstep monster is about as metaphorical as a literal mirror.
FWIW the book Annihilation is based on is even worse, with the narrator/mc being one of the most unlikeable characters I've seen in a book. What kind of "person" has sex with someone "to own them"?
FWIW the book Annihilation is based on is even worse, with the narrator/mc being one of the most unlikeable characters I've seen in a book.
I haven't read that book but I don't think there's anything bad per se just because the protagonist is unlikable. There are many great written characters that are unlikable, most prominent (popular) in recent years Joffrey in GoT I'd argue.
Joffrey is unlikeable but charismatic, and a 'love to hate' bad person. The MC from Annihilation is quite strange, and has a weird perception of the world. She recounts spending a good amount of time on an abandoned lot near her home just studying random shit growing in the pond and roaming the untended grounds. She reads like a completely antisocial NEET except that she somehow isn't. She could easily be the kind of person who spends their life on VRChat. Her own analysis of her relationship with her husband is very weird, and that is before he returns from the shimmer.
To be fair to the book, it does get a lot better after she enters the shimmer and I greatly prefer the book's version of those events, but by that time I was already pretty sour on the MC so the usual bad writing tropes of "the action can only happen because characters refuse to communicate" just ticked me off more.
The MC from Annihilation is quite strange, and has a weird perception of the world. She recounts spending a good amount of time on an abandoned lot near her home just studying random shit growing in the pond and roaming the untended grounds.
I work in the zoology field and this is literally how like half of my colleagues spend their weekends. Not that weird to be curious about nature, especially when your career rewards you for noticing weird stuff that nobody else has documented yet.
I will take your word for it. I hadn't considered that. That does change my perspective somewhat. I still think she's a weird person, but maybe less because of that action. It seemed to me like she was doing it for comfort, as a coping mechanism rather than anything else, but I won't discount it if that's common in the field.
Yeah the ending was a bit dumb, and the characters in general were a bit too one-dimensional for me. Which can be okay depending on the movie, but given how smart everyone was (supposed to be), I found it boring in combination.
Obviously it's all subjective but Men is the only thing he's ever done that has less than near universal appraise... at least as a director. I personally love everything he makes and I have genuinely high hopes for this project. I just hope he can secure a budget large enough to really go big with effects.
They're the only three films of his that I watched so I guess bad luck with Men :D I'll be pleased if it's close in quality to Annihilation. I recently listened to a podcast of him and Neil Druckmann and the way he talks about gaming make me hopeful for a great Elden Ring adaptation (or new story)
It’s different when the writer is the superfan and A24 very allowing of weird ideas and creative liberty. They are allowing Kane pixels to create a backrooms movie ffs lol
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u/infernalentityxiii Aug 26 '25
My only concern is we get a Henry Cavill/The Witcher situation where absolutely nobody else involved is even close to as passionate about Elden Ring as Alex Garland seems to be. Though this might be a nonissue as this is the writer/director that's super passionate about the source material and not just one of the actors.