How often do you have £18 to spare on a couple of hours of entertainment? Why? Naming no names (although Google can easily point the finger, if you’re interested), but there is a cinema in the centre of London currently charging £18 for a no-frills ticket. Box office records are continuing to explode, but actual ticket sales are on the decline. The cinema may be a church for me (and maybe you, too), but it’s increasingly becoming a luxury many can no longer afford, particularly young people. She spoke of her pleasure at being able to stream the film the previous night via her family’s joint Netflix account, particularly as she had already spent her recent cinema-budget on seeing Black Panther, and did not have the funds to watch something as esoteric as Annihilation.
#ANIQUILATION NETF MOVIE#
Similarly, this time in form-time, one student was recommending the movie to the person sat next to her. On Tuesday, however, going into assembly, amongst the usual cacophony, Annihilation was audibly part of a particular group conversation – the participants were gleefully dissecting one particular scene’s aural-horror before being lectured on life skills. Again, and due to the algorithms of the playground, they catch the tent poles but seldom anything fringe. Like any part of culture, film can play a big role in this, and I teach dozens of students who really want to explore the medium but don’t necessarily have the opportunity to do so – for whatever reason. Working as a secondary school teacher, I’ve become fascinated by ‘cultural capital’ and just how a person’s social assets can facilitate social mobility. Yet Netflix, through their home release, has given this curio piece room to breathe in a claustrophobic market (and finally bring some prestige to their current slate of glorified straight-to-stream exclusives). It’s a complex sci-fi yarn that is mostly concerned with intellectual exploration that all out bang-for-buck cinematic economics, and would, in all honesty, have been likely buried by the likes of Black Panther and The Greatest Showman had it been traditionally released in theatres. Isn’t that kind of amazing? Isn’t that the silver lining in this stormy cloud?Īnnihilation, while fuelled by a uniformly excellent (nearly) all-female cast and made by a rising star, is hardly conformist entertainment for the masses. Their diet is mainstream, proudly so, and that’s fine – but now they, too, have Annihilation in their To Watch lists – and for a price they have already paid. Yes, they may indulge themselves in the big zeitgeist slices, but rarely anything more. The audiences who use movies as quick fix for escapism, some light emotional enjoyment, or simply to kill the time.
In this online bubble we have blown for ourselves, we have forgotten these types of audiences, quite different to us, who see film as a treat instead of an entitlement. For some, it is just pleasantly breezing in the background of other things. Sure, everyone is ‘into’ film – the same way we’re all ‘into’ taking nutritious substances into our bodies in order to process them into energy – but not everyone sees the medium as a hobby or sub-culture. However, that is not the case for everyone. You are currently reading this humble article on this humble website, so, and forgive me if I am being bold here, I am going to assume you have at least a fleeting interest in cinema (full disclosure: so do I). We do still have access to the movie, just not the way we perhaps wanted.Īs with most tantrums, it’s all relative. Right now, in fact completely legally and in high definition. Annihilation is a film which has been designed to be seen – and experienced – at the cinema, and it does chafe that we won’t be able to see it upon the format it was intended to be seen first in.īut: we are still able to see it. The criticism has been primarily fuelled by film fans airing their exasperation on social media about not being given the option to see this story play out on the Big Screen. Instead, Netflix picked up the distribution rights and plonked it on their streaming service, ready and waiting for us after work last Monday – and incurred rather a large amount of finger-wagging and fist-shaking in the process. The latest bout of byte-slinging has been sparked by the release – or, perhaps, lack of release – of Alex Garland’s Annihilation.įor context, the movie was apparently deemed “too intellectual” and “boring” for a global release, so us British troglodytes were not afforded a potentially risky roll-out to our neighbourhood silver screens.
0 kommentar(er)
