Manages to ignore everything that made the book great.

Rating: 3/10 (26 February 2018)

On it's own this movie would be OK, with moments ranging to pretty good. Compared to the source material, it is bloody awful. Alex Garland's script takes every nuance and question posed by Jeff Vandermeer's book and replaces it with the mind numbingly blunt or a cookie cutter answer. Replacing the border, an absolute edge with a door that appears just as mysteriously as Area X (there is no meteorite in print) with "the shimmer". The Physicist listening to three seconds of garbled radio and declaring as fact that "it refracts everything, even DNA", thus solving a mystery that some of the brightest minds in the country had been working on for YEARS. At almost every turn the screenplay takes a giant crap on both the original story and the audience's intelligence. You would think that the absurdly abrupt and hackneyed "climax" of killing the monster with fire (an organism that according to this very movie survived atmospheric entry and impact) would be the dressing on this crap salad. But no. That was Garland's decision to remove entirely from his movie some of the central plot points of the book. If you had told me that I was about to see an adaptation of Annihilation that completely cuts out the Tower, the Crawler, and the writing on the wall, I wouldn't have believed you. Well I just did, and I should have seen Game Night instead.