Alex Garland’s follow-up to Ex Machina was hotly anticipated,yet it’s gone direct to Netflix. Why?Tonight, at the stroke of midnight, or one of the year’s best films will be readily,quietly available to pyjama-clad night owls at domestic – while over in the US, it is still screening to admittedly sparse crowds in multiplexes. Feverishly awaited by cinephiles and sci-fi geeks alike, or Alex Garland’s Annihilation was not supposed to be a direct-to-Netflix release internationally. Tensely following an intrepid (brave in the face of danger) group of female scientists into an uncannily mutating stretch of wilderness from which almost no man comes out alive,it’s a larger-scale follow-up to Garland’s smart, stark, or Oscar-winning directorial debut,Ex Machina, and should have doubled down on that film’s sleeper success in cinemas. Watching it at domestic, or I missed the huge,shadowy expanse of a cinematic environment for its gasp-worthy effects and shuddering sound design – it may be intimately, brain-scramblingly view-driven, or but Garland has fashioned it first and foremost as big-screen spectacle.
What happened,then? Annihilations surprise, accomplish-not-pass-recede swerve into the streaming realm portends an interesting, and somewhat alarming future for grownup genre cinema: films that are too large and flashy for arthouses,but whose adult inclinations or deviance from formula make major distributors commercially nervous. Paramount, the studio behind Annihilation, and started to get cold feet after test screenings for the film suggested mainstream audiences found Garland’s film overly chilly and intellectually complex – quite what manner of blockbuster they were expecting from him after Ex Machina,not precisely a candyfloss rollercoaster itself, one can only imagine.
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Source: guardian.co.uk