Another Life – a review

I recently saw (or tried to) a sci-fi series titled Another Life on Netflix. The basic premise is in the first contact schema, wherein an alien spacecraft lands on Earth in the near future. The alien spacecraft looked cool, a rotating infinity sign. The promo and visuals looked nice hence I decided to watch.
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The alien spacecraft lands and builds a crystal tower.
Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 7.11.23 PMIt is not communicating and experts are trying to communicate with it via infrasound. The lead scientist here is the husband of the main protagonist Niki (who is captaining the spaceship Slavere being sent to investigate). So both are involved one in space and one on Earth in the matter. Now, no one is aware of whether the aliens are benevolent or malicious. They finally get to communicate with it by playing Western classical music, while the Salvere is en-route to its destination Pi Canis Majoris. So far so good.
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Yet, I couldn’t get to like the series. I expected the show will gather plot and pace, once I get past the first few episodes. This happened to me in the case of The Expanse, it turned out to be really good after the first few episodes). The series sort of grows on you, but not this one, at least not for me.
The first offputting thing was the design of the space-ship Salvere. It is supposed to be the most advanced and well-equipped ship yet design-wise the ship is absolute crap. In the control room of the ship, all the crew is standing. Yes, standing! And when the ship does some somersaults, people and things get thrown off-board. I mean a simple design sense would dictate that there must be seats, especially in an artificial gravity ship which undergoes tremendous acceleration, but no, it instead goes
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Space saftey 101: no seatbelts

Incidentally, the only person who is standing in the picture above is the holographic projection of the anthropomorphic computer named William onboard the ship. Hence, no inertia (well, technically speaking we are not in the GR domain) and hence sudden accelerations don’t affect him. I thought this would have been a one-off incidence, but things kept getting worse. After a mutiny, Niko kills her second in command over a decision which she takes a call which is not supposed to be tough enough. Was no psychological evaluation done?  The highly trained team (including the computer) looks like it is a bunch of teenagers high on hormonal imbalance. They loose a lot of resources while trying to get a slingshot from Sirius. The scene of Niko looking at Sirius through an observation deck is strange. Sirius in all its blue glory (temperature equivalent of 9500 K) is seen overshadowing the observation port, yet the light on her face is equivalent to 5500 K, the colour of golden hour.
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Blue light but yellow effect!Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 7.37.56 PM3

The pic in the middle is how the face is lit in the blue light of Sirius is shown in the series, right at least how it should be like. Perhaps the director is too heliocentric.
Now they are off to a planetoid they discover randomly moving across space to mine for crystals which contain a lot of water. I mean how much two people in spacesuits can mine by hand? Surely not enough to fulfill the requirements of a spaceship.
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This big suitcase will carry all our requirement of oxygen and hydrogen.

Anyways they come back in a hurry because of a life-threatening “earthquake” on another planet. One of the members of the crew is infected with a boron-based virus that kills one of the staff and infects all of them. The nervous system coming out of the host is one gruesome scene, though reminiscent of H. R. Giger‘s creature emerging from the host in Aliens. The crew discovers that it is airborne and the entire ship is infected with it. Then they find a cure that irradiating by gamma rays will kill the virus. Ergo the electromagnetic shields are brought down so that gamma rays from Sirius can enter the ship and disinfect it. If anything, gamma rays are not affected by electromagnetic fields at moderate levels, though they are electromagnetic in nature. They are not visible to us, neither we can feel them immediately.
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Achtung: Gamma ray march begins!

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Constipating out boron-based virus with gamma radiation

Yet the crew is bathed in a white light of gamma rays, and after contortions of their faces as if constipating they are cured. Magically no radiation sickness happens. How their own DNA and on-board electronics are not fried is a question worth pondering.
Moving forward, they discover a similar signal to the one earth coming from one of the moons. They find extraterrestrial life there. Which surprisingly is very much like the earth, including its atmosphere and also has liquid water. Now thankfully, at least they are not drawing water by bucket, but by a spaceship.
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A nice-cozy stroll on an unknown alien planet teeming with alien life

They find a planet full of alien life, and yet their reaction is so underwhelming. Read this statement in an as dead and as serious and slow voice you can

The excitement is killing me.

They rely completely on the computer to run the scans for any bio-hazard and find no problems at all. This is rather strange, I mean you are effing landing on an alien planet full of alien life and yet you don’t even put a spacesuit? Elementary error. They are not even bothered by the eerie similarity of the planet with earth, neither want to investigate the biochemistry. A rather strange (and dull) space crew who is not thrilled by the discovery of ET life. Through the day, they see only plant life. Even taste fruits by rubbing them on the skin and the licking a bit before eating! C’mon.
At the day end, they are attacked by alien animals (hexpods). They somehow get back to the spaceship without being eaten. And they are scanned and decontaminated, and yet an alien offspring manages to get onboard. So much for the decontamination and the automatic facility.
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Screenshot 2019-12-07 at 10.04.05 PM Then who am I?

A few moments later, the friendly onboard computer loses its circuits. And gravity goes off in the section where Niko is working. And she floats upwards… No magnetic boots on board a spaceship in zero gravity!? I mean this is not even wrong.
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Look no hands and I am floating.

Now, the artificial gravity on board Salvere is induced by rotation of the ship. In order to remove it, you will have to stop the rotation and it will affect the entire ship. But here it is hown to affect only one room, while in the next room it is normal. Gravity cannot be turned on or off at will. It stays.
About the warp speeds and lights years, they show the ship can travel. We are told it is 3 months onward and 3 months return journey (a total of six months). Considering that Sirius is at about 8 light-years, it has to be a warp drive. As even going at very high speeds will take certainly more than 8 years, one way.  But then if it is indeed a warp drive, why do we need that much time? Also, the ship has a sleeping/hibernating soma technology about which also I can rant, but won’t. There is another parallel plot developing on Earth with the crystal tower and trying to communicate with it, which I found even more boring.
I gave the serial a try for 5 full episodes but cannot do this further. If it cannot get its act together by this time, I guess it won’t in the future. It is a torture to watch so many commonsensical and scientific principles getting butchered. When there are so many amazing sci-fi stories that can be serialised, why these without any depth or even elementary sense are being made?
If I had to write, at least I would not make such elementary scientific blunders or plot with so many holes. Maybe I should write one, perhaps I have enough negative expertise on this topic now so that it won’t be as bad as some of them. Phew! I just stop it here as one of the bad-mouthing characters in the series sums it up for me
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The infinity sign shaped spaceship seduced me to watch this, you have been warned, watch it at your own risk

Quatermass and The Pit

One of my favourite genres of literature is science fiction. Two of the classic science fiction authors at the start of the previous century were H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne. The golden era of science fiction began in late 1930s and 1940s and flourished in the post-war era, which saw the big three (Issac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein) along with many others bring out their finest.  Some of the other remarkable authors from that era include (my personal preference, and by no means a representative list) Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Stanisław Lem, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kurt Vonnegut. Though novels were there, the mass format was the pulp science fiction magazines which published short or serialised stories from various authors. Many of the famous novels were first published as short stories in these pulp magazines. A selection of them with fantastic full-colour covers and some with black and white illustrations on the inside. Some of the prominent titles that come up are Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, Worlds of IF, Galaxy Science fiction among others.



The post-war era was an era where people believed that we will have permanent bases on the Moon by end of the 20th century and space travel would be commonplace. But we now know, it will be perhaps a few decades if not centuries for space travel to become common. The optimism in the 50s and 60s perhaps was fuelled by the cold war space race, which saw both the West and Soviets invest huge sums to research and development in developing space technologies. This optimism gradually waned as the Soviet empire fell.
With television becoming the newest technology to reach out to the audience, it is not surprising that many of the programmes were tuned to science fiction. I happened to stumble upon one such programmes while scanning the treasures at The Internet Archive. This was a British production titled Quatermass and The Pit created by Nigel Kneale. This is third in a series of Quatermass episodes.

Warning: Spoilers ahead


The six-part television series from 1958 (each episode is 30-35 minutes) is set in post-war London at Hobbs lane where during an excavation for a building some fossil skulls are discovered.  Dr. Matthew Roney, a paleontologist from a nearby museum begins to investigate the discovery. The fossil skulls and subsequent bones are found to be a new previously unknown dwarf hominid species, perhaps the missing link and are dated to roughly 5 MYA. Roney’s head assistant Barbara Judd, creates a reconstruction of the species which is present to the press.
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Soon after, when they continue digging a strange smooth object is found in the pit. The object resembles an unexploded World War II-era bomb and police and subsequently, the military is contacted for its safe disposal.
 
The bomb disposal squad works slowly and does not care about the archaeological aspects of the pit. This makes Roney impatient, who then contacts his experimental physicist friend Prof. Bernard Quatermass to hasten the disposal of the bomb disposal squad.
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Quartermass is involved in rocket research, which he intends to use for peaceful purposes. And this creates a rift between him and the military personnel he is working with. This has some moral and ethical implications for the purpose of scientific research and whether the scientists are responsible for their research being used for military purposes. The military intends to develop bases on the Moon and Mars in order to achieve supremacy in space which is against the principles of Quatermass.
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Quatermass and Colonel Breen visit the site in order to look at the discovery. When the supposed bomb is excavated deeper more fossils are found and the true shape of the artefact is revealed. And it turns out that the artefact cannot be cut by gas cutter, even after raising the temperature to order of 3000 degrees.
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Further digging, provides a disk and an opening to the artefact. Soon, the shape of the complete artefact is revealed. Rest of the hollow space is emptied out, yet the hull of the artefact remains close shut. There is a pentacle on the smooth inner surface of the hull.
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From the outside, the artefact looks like a rocket, which leads Breen to speculate that it is indeed a German rocket which fell here during the war. Also, traces of artificial radioactivity are found in the soil, which indicates that the artefact might be propelled by a nuclear engine. But Quatermass taking into account the age of the fossils speculates that the artefact itself might be of ancient origin. One of the bomb-disposal unit member has a strange hallucinating experience inside the artefact. He sees a dwarf-like figure pass through the walls.
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To open the hull, they try to drill it with a borazon boron nitride drill which makes no impact. But the action of the drills sets out weird vibrations which make everyone frightened and uneasy.
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Everyone is in a state of panic after this. Quatermass, Roney, and Judd run a parallel investigation after hearing out an old local couple about the neigbouring house being haunted. They dig older records and find episodes of haunting dating back till 1300s through to the present. For Quatermass and Roney this is too much of a coincidence and they begin to speculate about the ancient origins of the artefact.
Just after the drilling, a hole automatically appears in the pentacled hull. Roney looks inside and sees what seems like an eye. They force open the hull and find three insects inside the hull who are decaying.
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Roney immediately tries to stop the decay and preserves the specimens and takes them to the museum. They are unlike any insects known and are tripods. Quatermass and Roney speculate the extra-terrestrial origin of these insects, most probably from Mars.
When the drill operator is taking out his equipment, he triggers more poltergeist activity from the artefact and sets a panic across the street. He finally lands in a church in a state of delirium. He describes to Roney and Quatermass hallucinating visions of the insects found in the artefact killing each other.
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Like good scientists, they further investigate the visions using a Roney’s optic-encephalogram, a device that records impressions from the optical centers of the brain. It turns out Judd is the most sensitive of the lot to these visions and they record them. The visions show large-scale culling of the mutations of insects. Seeing these recordings as a “proof” of their theory of extra-terrestrial origins of the artefact. This evidence along with his theory is presented to the military brass. The theory is ridiculed as a fantasy, and a common-sense approach that artefact and the insects being propaganda from Nazi Germany is preferred. They want to dispel the myth that the artefact is that old or it is indeed extra-terrestrial.
The theory as developed by Quatermass is as follows taking into account the evidence he has:
The Martian race of insects is selected to weed out any mutants. So there is a tendency to have large scale purges, which are seen in the hallucinations of people. The Martians came here 5 MYA, and tried to genetically re-programme our ancestors in their own image. During this reprogramming, the human ancestors were given telepathytelekinesis and other psychic powers. And they were set back to Earth. The artefact found was one such space-ship which crashed while bringing modified hominids back to the Earth. Now in the vicinity of the space-ship, some of these long-forgotten powers are awakened. The spaceship itself induces the visions and poltergeist phenomena seen when the ground near the ship was disturbed. Quatermass fears that a large scale activation of such powers might lead to mass killings of humans as seen in the hallucinations.
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A media event is organised in order to address this once and for all. Quatermass pleads that this event must be stopped but in vain. Just as the live event is about to start, the power cables in the vicinity of the artefact, activates it fully. This sets chaos about everywhere and people are trying to kill each other. Somehow Quatermass comes out and is saved by Roney. Entire London is seen to be under mass panic and people killing each other and destroying things.
I will stop here and won’t ruin the climax for you.
You can watch the entire series at The Internet Archive

Episode One “The Halfmen” 

Episode Two “The Ghosts”
Episode Three “Imps and Demons”
Episode Four “The Enchanted”
Episode Five “The Wild Hunt”
Episode Six “‘Hob'”

Some reflections (as seen by a reader from 21st century):
The easy flow of information and relatively free access to the press seem to be unrealistic. For example, one of the reporters gets in easily and takes photos at will of the pit, the artefact and insects. In fact, even after the mysterious nature of the artefact is made known, no attempt at hiding it from the public is done. This is perhaps due to the fact that the military brass firmly believes it to be WW II era find, yet even in this case the free access to press is questionable.
The other aspect is the depth of the characters, which are frankly speaking one dimensional. But perhaps this is keeping in mind the general state of science fiction from that era. Most of the stories, films were like this which did not involve multiple levels of the plot. For example, another fantastic TV series from the era The Twilight Zone (1959) has similar storylines. The acting also looks over the top at times (not at all subtle at any point really), but perhaps this is again a reflection of that era and influence of theatre on films.
Quatermass, like a good scientist, considers evidence from the pit itself (the artefact with seemingly advanced technology, the alien bodies, the 5 MYA fossils), and from people (the visions, and the hallucinations, the elder couple who tell about haunting in the area) and historical records. The evidence of the artefact being old, is right there from the beginning, yet it takes Quatermass and others a long time to consider extraterrestrial origin. Perhaps, we, as readers in the current age, are more agreeable to such a possibility, hence we may find it a bit naive. But then we are trying to judge a production from another era with standards of another.
Some of the themes could be considered on a deeper level. For example, how does evidence from evolutionary aspects corresponds to this explaining? We can perhaps develop another story which takes this forward…
 

Review of Annihilation: the novel and the movie

Screen Shot 2018-04-29 at 4.27.55 PM.png .              annihilation
Somewhere on my feeds, I came to know about a movie named Annihilation starring Natalie Portman. The review was good, and it mentioned that the movie was based on a book of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer. So, I was in two minds whether to read the book first and then watch the movie or vice versa. I decided that I will read the book first and then watch the movie. Now that I have done both, here is a review of them, with important differences and my reflections about them.
Warning: Spoilers Ahead
We start with the book first, this will help us create a baseline, on which to review the movie. The book starts with the biologist and three of her team members (a psychologist, an anthropologist, a surveyor) initiated into a region known as Area X. Now, apparently bizarre things have happened inside the Area X, (perhaps a tribute to the X-files). And there is a border which separates Area X from the normal world. Now according to the book, this border is invisible. The team is trained for a prolonged period for their mission in a variety of situations with the psychologist as their lead. As they enter the perimeter of Area X, the linguist backs out (hence only a team of 4). Now through the book, the characters are almost never referred by their proper names, and it is part of the design of the training that it is that way. The idea behind this it seems is to make the mission impersonal, without including their biases.

> Besides, we were always strongly discouraged from using names: We were meant to be focused on our purpose, and “anything personal should be left behind.” Names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X.

This is an all female team, with only the surveyor having any military skill. Each one of the team members is given a weapon and basic camping equipment. They are not allowed to take any electronic or advanced technological equipments (digital cameras, for example). They say there is a reason for this, but it is never explained. Anyways, the team hikes for four days to reach the “base camp”, but none of them remembers crossing the perimeter into Area X, which they find strange. This is the camp set up by the earlier expeditions. Now, during the training, they have been trained with the map of Area X, where a lighthouse is where the team members get their bearings. One the first day at the base camp, they discover another artefact which is completely missing from the maps. This is what the biologist calls a “tower”, while others prefer to call it a “tunnel”. This structure “tower/tunnel” is a core part of the book. It appears as a round cylinder about 60 feet in diameter and 8 inches above the ground. There is an “entrance” due North of the tower. And it leads to a chamber below, the structure seems to be made of stone and the next day team ventures to explore it (descends into the spiralling staircase). When they are at a level below, the biologist discovers words on the wall of the structures which are glowing. The words read:

> Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that…

When the biologist gets closer to see what the words are made of (What are words made of anyway? Is the medium that gives the words their physicality matter?), she discovers that it is made of “Some sort of fungi”. In the process of looking at the words closely, a nodule bursts open and she inhales the spores that emanate from it. She hides this from the surveyor who is accompanying her. Now the biologist is unaware of how the inhaling of spores might affect her. They return to the base camp and agree to proceed the next day. In the meanwhile, the biologist notices something strange about the psychologist. It turns out the psychologist has been hypnotising the team members to control them since their training began. But somehow, due to the effect of the spores she has herself become immune to her hypnosis. She plays the role as if she is getting suggested by the hypnosis, covering that she is immune. Now the next morning, the biologist and the surveyor discover that the anthropologist is missing. The psychologist tells them that the anthropologist decided to go back. The biologist knows somehow it is not true.
The remaining team goes back to the “tower”, this time with breathing gear and masks. The psychologist refuses to enter the “tower” citing that the entrance must be guarded. The surveyor and the biologist descend into the tower. Now inside the tower, due to the biologists inhaling of the spores, she perceives it differently. She now can understand and look at the tower as a living organism, breathing with a heartbeat. While the surveyor is completely oblivious to this perhaps due to the hypnotising effect of the psychologist.

> I got my shit together because we were going to go forward and the surveyor couldn’t see what I saw, couldn’t experience what I was experiencing. And I couldn’t make her see it.

They see more writings on the walls of the tower as they descend further. They find that the script is “fresh” as they descend lower. They conclude that

> Something below us is writing this script. Something below us may still be in the process of writing this script.

They continue further, till they find something. There are strange ciliated feet markings on the stairs, which the biologist calls a “Crawler”. This something is the dead body of the anthropologist, with strange feet markings. The body is in disarray with her skull split open, and variety of organisms making her body their home. She is carrying her vials, and one of the vials has a sample which the biologist promptly collects. Contemplating on the “something” that might have killed her they decide to return to the top. They also discover another set of footprints which they conclude must be of the psychologists’.
In between all these events, there are flashbacks, to the time before the expedition. Telling us about the previous life of the biologist, how she was aloof even when in a crowd. Her fascination with an overgrown swimming pool, full of life. Her strained relationship with her husband, who is part of an earlier expedition. Her husband decides to volunteer for going to Area X and leaves her. There is no news about him or from him until one day he suddenly returns. He is not himself. The biologist can tell that something is missing. The next day, the people from Southern Reach come to pick him up, and he goes with them without any confrontation. But the biologist does not feel sad about this:

> Seeing him leave I felt mostly a sense of relief, to be honest, not guilt at betrayal.

With that background, the constant connect with her husband and her past life is brought to the narrative. When the surveyor and the biologist come back to the top of the tower, the psychologist is nowhere to be found. When they return to the base camp, she is neither there. And the psychologist has taken up all the weapons with her along with most of the rations and disappeared. They then try to make sense of the photos and samples that they have collected in the tower. But the photos are a riot of colours, which the surveyor finds rather disheartening. While the biologist discovers that the vial which she collected from the dead anthropologist has cells of the human brain. In all this, the biologist decides to go to the Lighthouse which seems to be the source of all the activity. The surveyor decides that she will stay back at the camp.
The biologist starts her journey to the lighthouse, on the way she sees the abandoned village, which is mentioned in the maps. There she finds that there are human like forms of trees, which are seated on a table. In all this while she feels “brightness” within her. She is changing. Due to her exposure to the spores from the words in the tunnel. She recalls her past experiences and the current ones and tries to make sense of things around her, things happening to her, things that have happened to her. As the biologist approaches the lighthouse, the area around it is desolate, and the lighthouse is seen as a fortification. Carefully, being aware that the psychologist might be there to kill her she enters the lighthouse. Everywhere she sees blood and signs of violence all through to the top of the lighthouse. Just before the top, she looks at an old photo of a person, whom she calls the lighthouse keeper. At the top, she discovers that a lot of information was kept from her and the team members regarding Area X. There were many more expeditions, as the huge cache of personal journals from previous expedition members reveals, rather than just 11 that the team was told about. She finds the journal of her husband and then departs from the lighthouse. While going down, she notices the psychologist at the bottom of the lighthouse. When she goes to her, she is on her deathbed. A fungi kind of substance has covered her arm. The psychologist utters the words “Annihilation” in desperation many times over to the biologist. She admits that she tried to kill the biologist with a gun as she was approaching the lighthouse, but her hand would not let her do it. The psychologist tells the biologist that she has changed, she sees her like a flame. It is this brightness that the biologist is talking about. She answers some questions like she took the anthropologist back to the tunnel to take samples from the Crawler under hypnosis, but anthropologist went too close to the Crawler and got killed in the process, but refuses to answer many other questions. She also tells the biologist about entries in her husband’s journal. After she has passed, the biologist takes whatever documents that the psychologist has with her. This includes a list of suggestive hypnotic keywords to be used on the team members. Annihilation in this list means “help induce immediate suicide”.
While returning from there it is already nightfall, and the biologist can see the changes in her own body. The glow is visible. While coming back, she almost encounters the beast which is responsible for the moans that they have been hearing since they came in. She spends the night on a tree, with her skin glowing. Next morning, she starts her journey towards the base camp. When she is very close to the base camp, she is shot at twice by the surveyor. The surveyor is in a frenzy, to kill the biologist. The “brightness” in the biologist start to heal her and gives her super sensing ability. With these, the biologist kills the surveyor and returns to the base camp. At the base camp, she finds that the surveyor has destroyed almost all of the basecamp and laid waste any water and food that might be there. All the papers and journals are burnt.
The biologist does an analysis of the samples that she has collected and mutations of human form emerge. The brightness in her is healing the bullet wounds, and making the biologist feel better. She thinks that due to the diversion of healing her wounds, the brightness (her mutation?) has stopped growing. She reads her husband’s journal, which she finds is mostly written for her with her pet name “ghost-bird” appearing several times over. The next day she decides to go to the bottom of the tower to find the Crawler. She takes a mask with her, as she enters the tower, her skin starts to glow and responds to the walls which are also glowing. The words are getting fresher and fresher as she goes to the lower levels. Finally she comes to the place where the Crawler is still working. The encounter with the crawler

> No words can … no photographs could …

The biologist survives the encounter, due to the mutations already in her. The Crawler consumes the inner self of the biologist in a sense, which gets a hold over her inner person. She passes out several times during this:

> What can you do when your five senses are not enough? Because I still couldn’t truly see it here, any more than I had seen it under the microscope, and that’s what scared me the most. Why couldn’t I see it?

Finally when the ordeal for her is over:

> It is not that I became used to the Crawler’s presence but that I reached a point—a single infinitesimal moment—when I once again recognised that the Crawler was an organism. A complex, unique, intricate, awe-inspiring, dangerous organism. It might be inexplicable. It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture—or my science or my intellect—but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practised mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me.”

The idea of the Crawler as some sort of creature which can mutate organisms and can mimic their thoughts is interesting. After this biologist continues to go down the tower, at the end of it she sees a door of light. But she is somehow unable to continue to this door, and start the journey back dreading the draining encounter with the Crawler again. But this time, the Crawler does not show any interest in her and lets her go. While going back she takes a last look at the Crawler, and sees a glimpse of the familiar face of the lighthouse keeper in the crawler. How did this happen? Somehow did the lighthouse keeper become the Crawler? What made this change? The answers to these questions are not given.

> When you are too close to the centre of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire.

Finally, she emerges out from the tower. The book is the journal entry of the biologist.

> Observing all of this has quelled the last ashes of the burning compulsion I had to know everything … anything … and in its place remains the knowledge that the brightness is not done with me. It is just beginning, and the thought of continually doing harm to myself to remain human seems somehow pathetic.

The biologist tells us that she is leaving to explore the further reaches of Area X as the last entry in the journal.
Thus we see that the entire book, no names are referred to. Overall the sense of mystery about the origin and purpose (if any) to the events are left mostly unanswered. The above quote captures it very well. Overall I found the book satisfying read.
Part 2: The Movie
Now, that I had already read the book, I turned to the movie. The first start thing that you notice in the movie is the use of names, which is in complete contrast to the book. Also, the border which is invisible in the book, is shown as a “shimmer” in the movie. The idea that the psychologist is hypnotising the team members is also missing. In the movie the biologist (Lena, played by Natalie Portman) has also had military training. The team members in the movie are a biologist, a physicist, a medic, a psychologist, and a geomorphologist. Area X is identified as an anomaly which is increasing its range with time. All the missions/expeditions to the area have failed and no one except the biologists’ husband has returned. Unlike in the book, the Southern Reach gets to the husband in a rather aggressive way and it is at the same time they take in the biologist. In the book she volunteers herself to go in.
When they reach Area X, they become self-aware only after 3-4 days have passed and none can explain how the time was lost. As they are going towards the basecamp (in the movie it is an army base not a tent camp) they are attacked by an alligator with a different morphology. In the base camp they discover that the earlier expedition members are cutting open one of their own and showing his intestine moving like a different creature. None of the team members knows that the medic in the video is the husband of Lena. They become shocked after seeing the video and take shelter in a watchtower. To keep a watch, the psychologist is at a post on the ground. I could never understand this logic. If you are already on a watchtower, why the hell do you need a watch on the ground. Due to the noise the group wakes up and a mutated bear takes away the geomorphologist. Next day, they continue their journey towards the lighthouse. They stop at the village with the human-looking forms of the trees. The physicist explains that Area X is refracting everything from radiation to the DNA and hence it is causing so much mutations. Here biologist discovers that she is mutating too and that is when the medic ties all three of them and starts asking them questions. She discovers that the video of cutting open from the previous expedition has Lena’s husband in it. She wants answers, that is when she hears the geomorphologist call for help. She rushes to help her only to be attacked by the same bear. The bear comes up, and it is revealed that the bear is responsible for the voice of help. The medic comes back to attack the bear, but bear kills her. In the meanwhile, the physicist becomes free and kills the bear. The psychologist leaves for the lighthouse immediately in the middle of the night.
In the morning the physicist wanders off, leaving Lena alone. Lena then starts the journey to the lighthouse. There are several crystal trees before the lighthouse on the beach. She discovers the body of her husband at the lighthouse, which is recorded by the doppelganger of her husband. She goes inside a hole which seems to be the origin of the event. There she discovers the psychologist being consumed by the “Crawler”. The “Crawler” makes a copy of her by drawing a drop of her blood and takes a humanoid form. She tries to go out of the lighthouse but the humanoid form stops her from doing so. The humanoid form otherwise mirrors her actions. Finally, she takes a phosphor grenade and gives it the humanoid form which one her touch changes to her doppelganger. The grenade explodes and sets the “crawler” on fire. The fire burns everything and destroys all the mutations it has cause and brings down the shimmer. The movie begins and ends with the interrogation of the biologist about how she brought down the shimmer and was still alive.
The movie has advanced technology with the expeditions ( digital recorder, memory cards). Most importantly, in the movie, there is no mention of the tower or the running glowing script in it, which I found the most annoying. In the movie, the entire action takes place at the lighthouse. Also, killing of the creature and cease of the mutations was not needed, I personally found it too anthropocentric. Also, no explanation of the title of the movie is given. Overall, after reading the book, the movie is really disappointing to watch. It neither has the depth of the plot nor the philosophical or existential questions that permeate the book. In perhaps making the movie audience-friendly, the scriptwriter annihilated the core ideas in the book which made it special.
TIL you can kill a time-space warping, an interstellar traveller with a phosphor grenade, begin stocking right now!
I am now onto the second and third part of the Southern Reach Trilogy: Authority and Acceptance. Will post reviews of them once I am done, and surely we will not be seeing movies made based on them in the time I complete my readings.