more annhilation thoughts bc im not crazy you are
its kind of interesting how much I adore the concept and setup of the novels bc I didn't even like reading the southern reach trillogy that much. while the first book was very gripping and got me very invested to see more, it set up a lot of questions and a vague sense of horror that the second one kind of just. left hanging to focus on convoluted coorporate shenanigans that rrally just boil down to 'we dont know shit about area X but the higer ups sure have been hypnotizing the protaganist to tell the truth about his findings (which was a whole lot of nothing anyways) ooooo trippy ending the barriers been breached which is super bad for reasons we haven't actually given you solid proof of beyond flowery and vague descriptions that could just be metaphor, but it is!! isnt that fucked up'
maybe the third book answers more stuff about what area X actually does to people amd the threat it poses but I lost motivation to read it as of now bc the writing did a lot of telling and very little showing. which is impressive because the first book actually describes in detail what the expedition encountered and experienced, but all the researched died due to turning on each other, more or less, and if the envirnment killed them, it was due to another expedition member.
which is all fine and well, the area X doesn't have to be an active or malicious threat, I get that's not the point of the series. but I really wish we were given actual, concrete examples of the uncanny effects the area has to assimilate and change people until they're a part of it. the closet thing we get to that in the novel is a brief cameo of a boar with a face thats described as looking distorted, and speculation that something wailing in the bushes could have once been someone from a previous expedition.
personally, I feel like the anaihillation movie fixes a lot of what made the first two books unsatisfying to me. like it still raises a lot of questions about how and why area X came to be, but it manages to make the plotline about the area/entities making clones of the reasearchers to send back somehow feel a lot less random by having the thing in the bottom of the 'tower' eventually morphing to look like the biologist. plus, there's more added that actually shows how the area changes amd assimilates people into this uncanny extension of its wilderness.
I know the mutated bear scene in the movie is praised for how clever and horrifying it was, and it absolutely is. but, I also think the whole feild of people shaped flower bushes in particular really stands out as an example of a good, tangible example of actually showing the audience why area X is deviant from your average, safe 'pristine wilderness', why its consisered a threat, what it can possibly do to people and, most importantly, *why* all the researches and investigators of souther reach don't understand it. because we aren't told why the people bushes are there, if they were grown naturally by the forces of area X trying to recreate humans that encountered it, or if they actually used to be people, or how it all happened. but its clearly something not meant to be there, that hits the uncanny valley very well in the context of what has been theorized about area X.
idk I just think its neat how a movie can make a field of weirdly shaped plants so terrifyingly exisential. genuinely that scene gives me the same sense of intimidated wonder that I felt when I learned plants communicate to each other via eletrical pulses through their root networks, and how aspen groves are all technically one giant connected tree with many sprouts.
anyways yeah annaihilation brainrot
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