A month at the movies #24: Annihilation

Haven't seen it.

I do want to check it out, because if you're going to rip off anything, I'll take somebody who is trying to do Andrei Tarkovsky, instead of Michael Bay. But I doubt I'll be doing it anytime soon, and that's entirely because it only got a release through Netflix in this part of the world. The internet is our house is rubbish for reasons no technician has ever been explain to me, and watching anything that is streaming is sheer folly because I'll spend most of the time waiting for it to buffer.

But I'm also just really annoyed that this is the only way to see it here, because it was one of the few films coming out this year that I genuinely wanted to see in the cinema. It looks intense and stylish and all I want to do is see that in a dark room on the biggest screen in town. Not my TV.

When people talk about the experience of going to the cinema these days, it's usually told through the medium of moaning. Rude patrons who won't turn their bloody phones off, projection equipment that is sub-standard, and staff who plainly don't give a shit about any of it.

But I still fucking love going to the cinema. Getting out of the damn house, hearing booming sound systems echoing around a large auditorium, enveloping in the darkness and lack of distractions and the way it forces you to pay some damn attention to what's happening on the big screen. I can feel things about a movie in the theatre that never come up at home, I can have a reaction to the story that is more heartfelt than anything I feel on the couch.

Unfortunately, it feels like going to the cinema doesn't love me back, because there is fuck-all on the list of coming attractions that inspires me to get off that fucking couch. It's all cynical kids' movies, endlessly bland blockbusters and a surprising amount about middle-class and middle aged French people fucking. Anything that looks too intense - the best goddamn thing to see on the big screen - is relegated right out of the theatre.

There were some parts of the world where I could have seen Annihilation in the theatre, but this isn't one of them, and that's one less reason to bother going to the cinema. Maybe I'll catch it on some plane sometime.