Strange, surreal and mesmerising. Lena (Natalie Portman) is a biologist and former soldier and is surprised when her husband (Oscar Isaac), assumed missing, turns up at her door. He was investigating a mysterious portal known as the Shimmer, from where no-one has emerged alive. Now she and a team are the newest group exploring the space. A space that is warping everyting around it and growing by the day.

It's mostly a horror SF story, not for the squeamish and I found it very interesting to watch. It's a pretty well-worn trope but well executed and I'm glad that the Hugo Award encouraged me to watch it. ( )

Lena is a former U.S. Army soldier who has long since quit that life and is now a biology professor. She met her husband while they were in the military, and he's still active duty. At the start of the movie, Lena is in some kind of quarantine and is being questioned. Flashbacks show that, 12 months after her husband left on a secret mission and was presumably killed in action, he suddenly reappears outside their bedroom. He seems strange and confused, and soon after his reappearance he begins to experience massive organ failure.

Lena then learns that her husband's mission involved entering something the people who study it call "the Shimmer," an area of land that was thankfully mostly uninhabited before it was blocked off and taken over by an odd, shimmery wall. Unfortunately, the wall is steadily expanding, and not one member of any of the past exploratory missions has made it back...except for Lena's husband.

Lena gets herself accepted to the next exploratory mission, one of the few composed entirely of women and entirely of scientists rather than military. Since she can't do anything for her husband outside the Shimmer, Lena believes she owes it to him to find out what he saw and what caused it all.

I read the book this movie was based on almost 10 months ago, planning to see the movie in theaters. I waited and waited and finally realized it wasn't going to show in my local theater. I then waited for it to pop up in Netflix's (U.S.) catalog. Still no go. When I saw the movie on a bargain shelf, I figured it was now or never.

I wasn't a huge fan of the book, which was strange, underwhelming, and featured lots of mystery with no answers. I was intrigued enough to read the second book, but since that, too, contained more questions than answers, and since reviews indicated that the final book would be more of the same, I decided to quit there. I still wanted to see the movie, but I was a little worried that all it'd add were some visually stunning scenes to the mess.

Thankfully, although the movie kept quite a few elements from the book, like the all-woman team, a few oddly mutated things, and the lighthouse destination, it mostly went in its own direction, even to the point of tweaking the main character's personality (she came across as much more of an odd loner in the book than she did in the movie). I felt the book had more intriguing mysteries, but also that the movie, which actually went somewhere with its mysteries, was better overall.

And hey, in the movie everyone had names. Yay for names!

Of course, since so many things were tweaked or changed, I also didn't know what to expect. There were a couple scenes that were too gory for me: some video footage that, unfortunately, is important to the story and should be watched even though it's disturbing, and the final moments of a particularly gruesome animal attack. There were also some really pretty moments, as well. My favorites were the deer things and the human-shaped plants. I will say that it was a little hard to settle down and really enjoy the pretty things when I kept expecting one of the area's horrible things to suddenly make an appearance.

I was curious to see whether the lighthouse portion would follow the book or go its own way, and it definitely did more of the latter, although there were moments that reminded me of the tower (tunnel?) in the book. I'm not sure I liked the movie's ending - the way things worked out struck me as too easy considering the many missions that had previously been thrown at this place - but it was definitely a relief to be given a proper ending.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) ( )

Scientists explore a region where Things Are Weird.

3/4 (Good).

It's a very interesting movie, but it's also kind of frustrating. It's twin catchphrases are "that's completely impossible" and "I don't know." You never quite know what's going on, which would be fine, because you at least know enough to ask interesting questions. But you also don't really know what happened in the movie, since most of it is framed as a story told by an extremely unreliable narrator, which kind of makes the whole thing seem pointless. ( )