:INFO
What the Film Could Not Carry From the Page
Alex Garland made a genuinely unsettling film of Annihilation in 2018 and I watched it before I read the book. That was the wrong order. Jeff VanderMeer's novel works because it happens entirely inside a narrator who does not name herself and who cannot fully trust her own perceptions. The film externalizes what the book keeps interior, and in doing so it loses the specific dread that makes the novel work. They are related and one is much better than the other.


:NOW
Thinking about how VanderMeer uses unreliability as plot architecture

:QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:Jeff VanderMeer]
Nothing in Area X is what it appears to be. That is the first thing Area X teaches.


:JOURNEY
Reading Annihilation
5 Tone set immediately
5 Peak horror
5 First person dread
4 Best unsatisfying

:NOTE
Read the book before the film if you can. The film is good but the book operates through a mechanism the film cannot replicate and the difference matters enormously.


:POLL
If you have read the book and seen the film, which did you prefer?
The book, clearly and by a wide margin
The film, because the visuals did something the prose could not
They are different enough that I love both separately
I have only experienced one of the two so far