Alex Garland's ANNIHILATION proves pretty much the annihilation of Alex Garland

A sophomore slump for the record books in which the writer/director of the wonderful Ex Machina descends to ham-fisted, lugubrious and spell-it-all-out silliness, ANNIHILATION proves such a tiresome and obvious piece of science-fiction that you may have to watch Alex Garland's first foray into both writing and directing a second time, just to recall how classy, subtle, dark and intelligent a genre piece can really be.

His new film is dark, all right, but that's about all it has in common with its superior predecessor.

I admit to being completely befuddled as to why Mr. Garland, pictured at right, has chosen to be so tiresomely expository in terms of how he verbally explains so much to his audience. Initially, at least, he refrains from this, and it is not until maybe one-third of the way into this overlong, two-hour movie that we start getting the lectures by one character to another that make certain we understand what is happening plot-wise, "science"-wise and -- oh, yes -- morally speaking, too. Any ring of truth in terms of genuine conversation goes missing even as we're fed all this expository catch-up material.

Sure, the film is slow-moving (very, and it seems to grow slower even as it moves along), but intelligent adult audiences usually can put up with that, provided the plot and/or characters are strong enough to maintain interest. Here, the plot only grows more tiresome, while the characters are lucky to have a single defining feature.

Annihilation's plot has to do with a soldier husband (Oscar Issac, above) who disappears while on a top-secret mission then comes home to his scientist/professor wife (Natalie Portman, below) a mere shell of a man who then drops near-dead at the dining room table. So wife determines to discover what hubby was up to and what has happened to him.

This means becoming involved in that secret project, about which we learn much much more, and then traveling into something called "the shimmer" (below), about which we learn even more. Nothing looks promising in terms of anyone's survival here, including actually all of humanity. But on we go, as our Natalie joins a quartet of women who venture into this new kind of abyss, only to get picked off one by one. Hey, that's original!

Step by step everything that's going on is then explained to us, and the film -- which, throughout, has been a slough punctuated with a couple of scenes of suspense and slasher/monster thrills -- finally concludes with a bravura display of special effects that goes on so long that it achieves the kind of significant boredom that only CGI can these days manage.

The supporting cast supports as best it can, and Garland caries his theme home as expected. Perhaps he works better in the smaller scale of Ex Machina rather than in the much-bigger-budget realm of supposedly blockbuster sci-fi.

In any case, Paramount who is releasing this 120-minute movie, seems to have yet another dud on its hands. Too bad. The film hit theaters the last week in February and may still be playing at one or two near you. Click here to find out.

Year's best film-NEVER LET ME GO-on DVD!

Mid-September of last year, TrustMovies pegged the Mark Romanek/Alex Garland/Kasuo Ishiguro collaboration NEVER LET ME GO as "the best film of the year (so far)." Watching it again this week on DVD (it's on Blu-Ray, as well) only underscores that opinion. Yes, The Social Network is the best of the nominated films, but Never let Me Go is, by leaps and bounds, more unusual, moving and profound.  If you follow it carefully (it's a very quiet film), by the finale, you will sit in grieving silence for the human condition and for the inevitable "use" of the less powerful by those who possess the power.

The movie is not "political" in any overt manner, yet its conclusions are inescapable. And I suspect this is why so many of my friends found it too depressing. It's a sci-fi film, but one without special effects, interplanetary travel or even a car chase. Its "aliens" are just like you and me -- nice (or not so) folk brought up to be "good citizens" who are trying to lead their lives as best they can. The "other" captured on film has rarely seemed so normal. Sheep-like, perhaps, but does anyone remember how nearly all Americans jumped on the bandwagon of the Iraq war, despite the obvious lies it was built upon. We are sheep. Even now, see how many of us clamor not to have health care. Ah, but the intelligent, though confused, sheep you'll meet in Never Let Me Go will break your heart, while making you think of all those "outsiders" of history, from slaves (Black and otherwise) to Jews, gays and -- well, take your choice.

Oddly, the movie has been (and continues to be) marketed as a love story. It is that, but it is so much more. Well, marketing reigns. But those expecting any "normal" kind of love story may come away upset. You cannot watch these people for whom you grow to care so much and not be aware of what they stand for and how society has used them for "the greater good." And the actors -- Carey Mulligan (above, left, from An Education), Andrew Garfield (above, right, of The Social Network!) and Keira Knightley (above, center, and further above) -- could hardly be better.

While the film has received a number of good reviews, many of our cultural taste-makers have found it wanting in that special realm of "style." Yet Mr. Romanek's style is perfectly suited to the subject at hand, for he makes you observe and listen carefully. I am afraid some of our "better" critics cannot see the forest for the trees.

My original review of the film is here. Do not let this movie go by unseen. I almost  never use the word "classic" to describe a new film because only time has the ability to designate that. But I'll stake my reputation, such as it is, on this film's being discovered and re-discovered down generations. Decades from now, if life as we know it still exists, Never Let Me Go will seem oddly prescient -- for a sci-fi film set in the past. No wonder: It's our history.

You can find the film now for sale or rental at your local DVD outlet (except for Netflix and Redbox, that will get it in a few weeks time).

Film of the Year (so far): the Romanek/ Garland/Ishiguro NEVER LET ME GO

“You poor creatures.” Is this quiet exclamation not a fitting epitaph for the human race? In NEVER LET ME GO, the maybe-masterpiece that director Mark Romanek (below) and screenwriter Alex Garland have made from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, we hear this statement addressed, with profound sadness, to two of the film’s three protagonists. Their antagonist is society itself, of course. Historically, most societies have found a way to make their power system – Capitalist, Communist or Fundamentalist – serve those who hold that power and who thus make certain that the “haves” are well-served by the “have-nots,” usually by positioning a portion of their people into the status of  “other.”

One of (maybe the most important) uses of science-fiction -- of which this novel and its filmed adaptation are examples (they also fit into the categories of "alternate universe" scenarios and dystopian fiction, though is any society not dystopian?) -- is to explain how our own world works (and might work better or worse) by showing us imagined, futuristic worlds. Never Let Me Go achieves all  this and more without ever raising its voice or sporting a special effect. One of its charac-ters raises his voice -- once, early on, as a child, and then later as an adult. This second time provides a despairing heart-rending moment, the likes of which has seldom been seen (or heard) in cinema history. It's that kind of movie. And yet it never insists.

The film follows the lives of two girls (Kathy and Ruth) and a boy (Tommy) from early adolescence to adulthood, giving away the secrets of who these people are only gradually and glancingly. (That's Ella Purnell, above, as young Ruth, and Isobel Meikle-Small, below left, as young Kathy with Charlie Rowe, who plays young Tommy.)

Just as gradually and glancingly as the facts of the situation come to light, so, too, do the filmmakers give us entry into the the minds and emotions of the three, and this, I think, is the key to why the film succeeds so well.  By the time the movie draws to its ineffably fraught conclusion, we have come so far in understanding and empathy that there, at last, lies before us life in all its devastating complexity, pain, sadness and even -- against all sense, considering the awful situation at hand -- joy and love, tinged as both are with the knowledge of how soon we must lose them.

The actors who assume the young-adult and then the fully-adult versions of the children are Cary Mulligan (above, left, from An Education), Keira Knightley, (center, from those "Pirates" movies and The Duchess)  and Andrew Garfield (Boy A and the Red Riding Trilogy).  They are splendid and unforgettable.  Ms Mulligan, in particular, assuming the pivotal role, is a revelation and then some. Her final speech is as moving and profound as anything in the canon. In the supporting cast are Charlotte Rampling (as the headmistress of the school at which our threesome is taught, Natalie Richard as its "art" connoisseur and Sally Hawkins, below, as the teacher who decides to explain their future to the children.

The movie itself is profound. Along the way, you'll be put in mind of everything from countless Holocaust documentaries and narratives to the long, ongoing journey for black, gay and women's civil rights. You may think of the surprisingly fine Torchwood: Children of Earth or M. Night's silly The Village and Michael Bay's sillier The Island, of Logan's Run, Soylent Green and other sci-fi films that address the bizarre ways in which society "solves its problems." And of Blade Runner, of course, and what it means to be human.

This film outdoes them all in its own quiet way.  No explosions nor chases. Hardly a special effect to be seen. (The little lighted bracelets that the kids use to "check in" is as much "sci-fi" effect as we see.) The odd, sort-of mauve, hard-to-describe screen color featured in the credits and that also connects the scenes may remind you of one used in the lovely, little-seen Canadian film Snow Cake. The choice of a color this unusual suggests, I think, what lies in store.

Romanek, Garland and Ishiguro manage to place us, as completely as I have experienced in a movie, into the role of the "other." Yet interestingly enough, most everyone we see here is "white."  (Britain seems to have solved her immigration problem, though I shudder to think how.)  I can't imagine any intelligent and empathetic person -- whether gay, black, woman, Jew, Irishman, Serb, Croat, Italian and all the rest of those "minorities" -- leaving the theater without the echo of "You poor creatures" resounding in their mind and heart and realizing, I hope, that it is in truth "We poor creatures."

Never Let Me Go, from Fox Searchlight, opens this Wednesday, September 15.  In New York City, it will play at the AMC Loew's Lincoln Square 13 and at Landmark's Sunshine Cinema.