Catastrophes and annihilation

I’m a guest on this week’s Philosophers in Space podcast, and that’s the cheerful topic of our discussion of the movie Annihilation, a film that I saw as one of the creepiest horror films ever when I first saw it, but my appreciation has grown greatly after a second viewing. It’s actually a movie about change and transformation, bringing together concepts from cancer and deep ecology. So we had a lot to talk about. So much we need two episodes, and Thomas Smith and Aaron Rabi and I will continue next week.

Also, that bear…haunts my nightmares. And we didn’t say enough about how great and atmospheric the music was.

Startling prescience

This is from a 1958 TV western. I think it might have been inspired by some kind of magical morphic resonance echoing backwards through time.

It looks real — I recognized some of the actors, who were familiar faces from the olden days of black & white TVs (wow, Robert Culp looks really young), but also Snopes confirms it, and also found a copy of the full episode.

I liked the ending. Maybe that’s a prophecy, too.

The movie this week was Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse

Everyone was raving about this movie, so I walked into it with elevated expectations, which is usually the kiss of death. But it wasn’t! Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse was excellent! It has an interesting, complex story without relying on the “Villains aiming to destroy the world!” trope — even the primary bad guy, the Kingpin, had a believable motive.

But best of all was the artwork. This was a comic book movie that was not afraid to be a comic book movie, stealing comic book styles and comic book art and comic book plots, and then reveling in the freedom of computer-assisted animation. It just flies along playing visual games in a way that highlighted the story. It’s also damned optimistic, and lately we really need that occasional taste of escapism.

I went alone to the theater, because when I told my wife it was a super-hero movie, she was turned off and uninterested. It’s too bad, because she missed out, and I think she probably would have enjoyed it, too. Maybe when it comes to Netflix…