1.0 Feb 2018

  • Shows that Garland’s directorial debut, Ex Machina, was no fluke
  • The film is filled with many of the same preoccupations as Garland’s debut—heavy stuff—metaphysical and existential with a dark outlook in the sci-fi genre
  • It’s a coup for Portman and feather in her cap but not much for the rest of the cast. I wish Oscar Isaac could be in everything- he’s superb in his few scenes
  • Any critic that doesn’t mention “Tarkovsky” “Stalker” and or “the room” is suspect and/or negligent
  • It has its own voice for sure but it’s a cousin to Arrival and Under the Skin even if I don’t think Garland is Villeneuve or Glazer quite yet
  • Formally the structure sets up well. We have flashbacks/dreams as we enter the different phases of the film
  • Resounding “god is not perfect” line I’ll have to connect with my phone by my side for notetaking at home during a second viewing
  • Visually there is almost a permanent prism-colored lens flare I absolutely love
  • Intelligent and ambitious
  • Meditation on evolution, and self-destruction
  • I absolutely love the wild silent lighthouse set-piece finale with sonic bass boom score—it may be enough to push into my top 10 of the year

2.0 January 2019

  • Not something I noted when seeing in theater but formally it starts soundly with Portman’s character in class talking about cells splitting
  • There is a bit of a recent sci-fi film casting short-hand with Benedict Wong (the Martian) cast her as her interrogator and David Gyasi (Interstellar) also in support
  • I said this initially but if you write a review or talk about this film for more than a few sentences and don’t mention Tarkovsky and/or Stalker you probably don’t know what you’re talking about
  • The shimmer has a unique lens flare—the color prism is an ongoing visual motif I adore
  • The sun also perpetually hangs there in almost every frame like Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are
  • Philosophical- we’re heavy into mutation, evolution, deconstruction—corruption of form, duplications of form— is this a hallucination? Surrealism? Love it.
  • Heavy greens, floral, horticulture in the production design
  • The splitting is a bit Kubrick’s 2001 and the cave in Empire which Luke faces off against himself
  • The bass-drop score at the bat$hit crazy ending with the doppelgänger. It’s an ambitious finale
  • With his twists at the end Garland has sort of set himself up as the thinking man’s M. Night Shyamalan
  • I think it’s a HR—closer to R than MS