Tonight, at the stroke of midnight, one of the year’s best films will be readily, quietly available to pyjama-clad night owls at home – while over in the US, it is still screening to admittedly sparse crowds in multiplexes. Feverishly awaited by cinephiles and sci-fi geeks alike, Alex Garland’s Annihilation was not supposed to be a direct-to-Netflix release internationally. Tensely following an intrepid group of female scientists into an uncannily mutating stretch of wilderness from which almost no man comes out alive, it’s a larger-scale follow-up to Garland’s smart, stark, Oscar-winning directorial debut, Ex Machina, and should have doubled down on that film’s sleeper success in cinemas. Watching it at home, I missed the vast, dark expanse of a cinematic environment for its gasp-worthy effects and shuddering sound design – it may be intimately, brain-scramblingly idea-driven, but Garland has fashioned it first and foremost as big-screen spectacle.
What happened, then? Annihilation’s surprise, do-not-pass-go swerve into the streaming realm portends an interesting, somewhat alarming future for grownup genre cinema: films that are too large and flashy for arthouses, but whose adult inclinations or deviance from formula make major distributors commercially nervous.
Source : foxnews
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