Far worse than the book

Rating: 4/10 (19 September 2019)

Having finished the book trilogy recently, I was curious how this little known movie was doing in adapting the first book to the screen.
Well it was not doing well.
The hypnotic quality of especially the first book has not been well translated to the screen. Whereas some major elements of the book are totally left out, the director is adding gratuitous violence, blood and gore. Thank you very much that's exactly NOT how to do it. Also the focus is wrong. Annihilation the book is nearly completely about a team of scientists meandering through a nightmare landscape, but the nightmare is in your head, the book is not using cheap effects to create it. The movie puts to much focus on Lena and her husband - just short flashbacks in the book - on shock effects and on putting aliens in a story where they never actually show in the book.
So all in all this is rather disappointing for someone familiar with the books. This could have been a psychodelic experience but the director wasted too much time in focusing on blood, gore and aliens. Maybe they realized that they were not up to something great - that would explain how they rushed the ending to be final instead of speculating on a sequel...