This was the other one of the updates that I indulged myself on, as we didn’t have any asks for it but I really wanted to give the spotlight to a movie that got shoved to the side by pretty much everyone involved in the distribution for it.

Drawing this piece was actually a lot of good fun, especially that Seedling. I did draw the Seedling before, last year when MLP was on its victory lap for Season 9, and I’ll say now what I said then. The design may be great, but the way they did the eyes for it is really disappointing. We could’ve used more alien, xeno eyes, kinda like how the Changelings are, so I gave it some resin-looking eyes that reflect his plant nature. Why wouldn’t I draw the Seedling in an update for a movie that has deer with fruits growing on their antlers? It writes itself, it’s so perfect. And speaking of deer with fruits on their antlers…

Ok, let’s get one thing out of the way before some smartass does, “Annihilation” is not a movie produced by Netflix. It’s a movie that had a theatrical run in the US and China, but when it came to other territories the distributors weren’t putting it in the theatre, so Netflix picked it up. Which isn’t really a bad thing. It’s a very efficient way to present this to a wider audience, but I would’ve liked the option to see this movie in a big screen, in a theatre, completely shut off of everything and just immersing myself into the world of the movie. And this is the type of movie that could benefit from being seen in a big screen, with a great surround sound system, and in complete darkness. At the time of watching this movie I couldn’t make my bedroom much darker and my old TV didn’t make justice to the visuals of this film.

And yet I absolutely adored it. It’s a wonderful movie that I could describe as best as an spiritual successor to “John Carpenter’s The Thing”, where the isolation of the characters comes from how horrific and how beautiful the environment is, confronted with an enemy that keeps shifting and changing, where not everything is explained as it’s not the point of the movie. You know how science fiction movies usually delve with the unknown on how it destroys our bodies but very rarely touches on the effect it has on our minds? “Annihilation” does this, without losing touch with the body horror. But here’s the thing, and the reason why I don’t understand why this movie was shoved to the side. There’s no complicated, or “too smart to understand” narrative here. The movie is very straight forward, and it never talks down to the audience. It doesn’t browbeat the science, and doesn’t have massive explosions or action scenes in it, and while the CGI isn’t super revolutionary (at parts it actually looks pretty fake) the overall tone is so dreamy and so loopy you could argue it’s the effect that the alien force has on the characters.

I’m not saying anything specific or giving away much information because spoiling this movie is real easy, and trying to talk about it is like trying to handle the porcelain wearing mittens after your hands have gone asleep. So let me skip to my recommendation.

Absolutely check out “Annihilation”. It’s one of the most interesting science fiction/horror movies made in the 2010’s, perhaps in the last 20 years actually. It carries the tone of John Carpenter’s best work, and doesn’t treat its audience like they’re idiots. Don’t miss out on it, and give it a watch.