Published: April 22, 2025.
I watched Annihilation (2018) yesterday, and I thought it was pretty good! Something I want to expand upon from my Letterboxd review is the comparison between Annihilation and Stalker (1979), where the latter has less “action” and I think is better off for it.
My general take is that the appeal of dry, cerebral media is the aforementioned dryness, and deliberate attempts to give the experience mass-appeal can oftentimes make the whole thing fall flat. An brief remark in a recent Shut Up & Sit Down video that contributed to this line of thinking is the idea that slow, “crunchy” board games benefit from a banal theme. An overly exciting theme can set expectations for something more dopamine-triggering, and a game that’s essentially managing a spreadsheet works best when it makes no effort to hide its nature.
There’s a different type of appeal to games that are spreadsheets and films that are philosophy lectures, and I think it’s to be expected that they aren’t for everyone. Mixing “amusement park” enjoyment with “6 hour history documentary” enjoyment only serves to highlight the contrast between the two, and won’t trick amusement park attendees into watching history documentaries, it will push people away from them. Drinking a dry wine after a sweet wine generally tastes worse because your taste buds are acclimated to something a bit more “fun”.
I think this is worth thinking about because it helps me articulate my disillusionment with Dungeons & Dragons; the focus on “gridded combat dungeon crawling” is more immediately rewarding and accessible than the “improv theatre make-believe” aspect. For many people, making the “number go up” isn’t a gateway drug to collaborative storytelling, it’s a means to a bigger number. Trying to organize a TTRPG group for a less combat-y system yields less players, but there are fewer shiny baubles to distract.
That’s the end of my rant, obligatory “if you find D&D fun I don’t hate you”, this has just been some things on my mind. I just think we shouldn’t worry about making roguelike deckbuilder autobattler Chess variants for an audience who doesn’t care about Chess in the first place; we ought to appreciate Chess for what it is and accept that it’s less attention-grabbing than a slot machine.
References (in case the hyperlinks break):
https://letterboxd.com/grungus/film/annihilation/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z28QZGg_wuE