One of my favorite movies ever. This completely changed what I thought science fiction was capable of.
Highly recommend the book and its sequels, Authority and Acceptance, even if you've seen the film. They're completely different, Alex Garland wrote the screenplay based on how he remembered the first book rather than its actual plot.
Huh. The books were about a really nasty form of fungus, according to Wikipedia.
That was not at all what I got from the movie. There was a meteor crash at the beginning even. I thought it was something like a von Neumann probe that wasn't compatible with our particular brand of reality, an attempt by an alien entity to reach out and establish a connection with a world it didn't understand. I loved the idea that all of the horrors were likely just incidental to the process of the entity attempting to learn in an inhuman fashion.
Jeff VanderMeer's books are strange. I just finished Borne and I'm kinda done with his writing style. It feels like an alien found a 'How to write mystery novels' book and wrote some itself.
I haven't read anything past the Southern Reach books, but that was part of the charm for me. I can definitely see how it can get exhausting though. I don't read as much as I'd like, and choosing that trilogy as my first books in several years was... one hell of a choice.
Oooh thank you for the rec! I didn't realize this was based on a book & it seems like the perfect scenario to expand on in a way only a novel can vs film.
Also one of my favorite movies ever, it also has a killer soundtrack. I rewatch it every few years and every single time I have helplessly hoping on repeat for a few days after.