January 18th, 2026

Media Literacy, The Realm of Facts, and Superstardom

Annihilation is a movie about self-destruction and identity. It tells you this, multiple times. It tells you this directly. Then people die in the way their bullet point listed backstory describes. Annihilation is, in my opinion, and, as a Superstar, in true fact, a bad movie. "The fate of destruction is also the joy of rebirth." "You have a shadow you must understand and control to overcome your own deficits." "People only come back from bad things when they have a reason to come back." These are acceptable readings of Annihilation, but these are all told to you. When something is told, not shown, it is not Art; it has descended to the Realm of Fact. There may be other readings of Annihilation that I missed, so I went on a journey to see what other people found: mostly the same trite, surface-level understandings presented to you by a spoon with airplane noises. The book seems to have more meaning, more depth, and may in fact, be good, but the movie (which from my understanding abuses the word "loosely") which loosely adapts the book has no such meaning to be found.

This was a hard review to write. It's hard to say that I am right, and some $50,000,000 are wrong. Why? I have no qualms putting myself above, say, Ant Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. I think it's because Annihilation is a movie that is trying to be artsy, and use metaphor in perhaps the bluntest way possible until it is no longer metaphor but a cudgel. I think it's because Dan "Folding Ideas" Olson told me it was good some years ago when I was in quarantine, and to rebel against Dan Olson, to rebel against the YouTuber genre is to admit that they are collections of people with microphones and cameras, and not actual authorities.

This reminds me of Leadhead's videos on Metal Gear Solid. MGS is a very dear series to me. It's very important to my psyche. While I believe she has some points, I mostly disagree with her for a variety of reasons that were much more fresh in my mind when I first played the games and listened to her videos than today. My Arch Enemy once argued with me for an hour about MGS3, my favorite game. He argued about whether or not his interpretation (that it's a reflection of Kojima's experiences) was effectively more valid than my interpretation (That it's primarily about independence and lost childhood). We could have been talking past each other, but eventually, after numerous citations, he admits, he hasn't played a single Metal Gear. In some perverted way I view myself as having lost to this Enemy. I believe I had something and that it was taken from me by him. This is the fact of yesteryear that I had to come to terms with. Now, as this year begins I must confront my Enemy, the Psued that he is. I must center my opinion over Dan Olson, over my Enemy, and maybe even my own attachments... That is the assignment of this year, the year of the superstar. And so I will say it one more time! Annihilation is a bad movie, and I proclaim myself literate enough to say so.