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Furthermore, the book’s time loops come from hundreds of Mimics known as “antennae”; the movie has just one “Omega” that controls the loop from one place and knows how to trick those unlucky loopers with false visions and other traps. Finally, All You Need is Kill pits Keiji and Rita against one another, since either represents an antenna to the other, while Edge of Tomorrow has them falling in love against the specter of death and restarting the loop with one of them not remembering being in the literal and emotional trenches together.
Annihilation
Coming off his mind-bending success with 2015’s Ex Machina, in 2018 writer-director Alex Garland adapted Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel Annihilation into an appropriately trippy film that both called back to the ominous source material… while interpreting it into something radically different onscreen than on the page. The general premise is the same, as an all-female expedition made up of scholars, scientists, and soldiers venture into Area X, a region of what was once Florida that has been transformed by some otherworldly elements. While the group are known only by their functions in the book—biologist, anthropologist, psychologist, surveyor—the movie gives them names to go with the familiar faces portraying each member, plus a linguist making them a quintet: Natalie Portman (the biologist and protagonist), Tessa Thompson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, and Tuva Novotny.
Both works have major WTF vibes, but the book goes more for psychological horror regarding what the biologist discovers in Area X, while Garland leans all the way into body horror by way of mutated animals and humanoid plants in “the Shimmer”—so named because of the actual change in the air and along its borders. It’s interesting that each story has its own unique visuals, like the oddly-named “Tower” (actually a staircase curving into the earth) that the biologist encounters in the book, which becomes a lighthouse in the film instead; versus Garland’s interpretation on how the Shimmer transforms its interlopers by way of grief and madness.
Even the methods that both stories use for exposition differ with the medium; the biologist learns key details about her husband’s prior unsuccessful expedition into Area X via his journals, while Portman’s Lena discovers video footage of her husband Kane’s (Oscar Isaac) ultimate fate at the hands of a doppelgänger. While the Annihilation novel ends with the biologist venturing further into Area X, as the book is just the beginning of the Southern Reach series, the film employs a familiar device in which Lena returns home to Kane, but it’s unclear if either of them is the same person who went into the Shimmer. Not surprising since when Garland was adapting the film, he had only the first manuscript to go by, so it makes for a more resolved (if still ambiguous) ending than VanderMeer’s series.
Stardust
Neil Gaiman’s darkly comic 1999 fantasy novel (illustrated by Charles Vess) and Matthew Vaughn’s more whimsical adaptation start and end in roughly the same place, but take very different tonal routes to get there. Naïve suitor Tristan Thorn (Charlie Cox) promises to retrieve a fallen star as a token for his supposed beloved, only to discover that the star has taken human form as Yvaine (Claire Danes), who is trying to make it back into the sky. While simultaneously pursued by a trio of bumbling princes fighting over succession to the throne, and Lamia (Michelle Pfeiffer), a witch hungry for immortality by way of literally consuming Yvaine’s heart, the two forge a bond and begin to fall in love.
A key expansion of the novel, and what I most remember from watching the movie in theaters in 2007, was the mid-movie subplot involving a pirate airship helmed by the delightful cross-dressing Captain Shakespeare (Robert De Niro). This charming interlude, in which the pirates teach Tristan how to fight and Yvaine how to dance, really sets the tone for the rest of the film and builds to a confrontation with Lamia that is more action-packed and based on the power of love, yet also more straightforward.
