“Annihilation” — A Mutation that Failed

Not all interesting ideas survive outside the mind.

It’s been five years since Natalie Portman’s appeared in a bona fide box office hit. Whether the scripts aren’t coming her way, or her management has failed her, or she’s failing herself (Did she actually think “Jane Got a Gun” would work?) something’s not clicking, and her latest film, “Annihilation” feels like a desperate attempt to succeed by changing genres.

And, I feel she again will fail because “Annihilation” mutates and merges genres without keeping enough essential bits of any of them to survive.

It’s not fun. I understand, it’s not meant to be comedy, but it’s not just not fun, it’s dismal! It lacks an ounce of humor, a single happy moment, a single joke, a single smile. No one in this film is happy. It’s like a depression pill.

It lacks visual impact. It surrounds itself with very ordinary scenery. Its budget went into creating mostly transient effects. The reason the rubber alligator’s on the poster is because that’s the film’s visual high point.

It lacks enough scifi thrills and destruction to keep the invaders from Mars and disaster crowds entertained, and lacks the gore needed to keep the slasher or torture porn crowds engrossed.

And it lacks suspense because a few minutes after we open, we interview the sole survivor, who gives us the high points, so all we lack are the details. It’s not a thriller, it’s a slow grind that eventually gets us back where we started.

Portman stars, but the script and directing fails belong to Alex Garland.

This is Garland’s second film. His first, “Ex Machina”, was a mind-twister about sentience and the hazards of artificial intelligence. His original screenplay got an Oscar nom, and Alicia Vikander got a Golden Globe nom as supporting actress, (a definite Oscar snub since Vikander as the world’s first sentient machine was the film). Since he filmed on a confined set, Garland made “Ex-Machina for $15 million. It grossed $38 million worldwide.

That success garnered him a larger budget this time, $40 million, which is too bad. It’s too much for a purely intellectual mind-twister, but not enough for a real visual blockbuster, and so it fails both intellectually and visually, and unless you’re doing musical comedy, story and pictures are all you’ve got.

If you haven’t seen it, but plan to, stop now, the spoilers start here.

The film leans almost entirely on Portman. When Garland’s not following her in the chronological narrative, he’s flashing back to her. We learn she used to be a soldier, before knocking the academic ball out of the park and landing a teaching job at Johns-Hopkins as a cellular biologist. We learn her special ops husband’s been missing for a year, and she’s yet to get over it.

Then, just as she’s about to paint their bedroom, signaling she’s finally giving up on him — he shows up, a seemingly dimwitted shell of his former self, who remembers nothing, and almost immediately goes into death throes.

After a bit of the-evil-government’s-in-control paranoia scenes, we find out her husband spent his missing year in a Florida swamp, within a mysterious effect the-evil-government-in-control paranoia people call the “shimmer”.

Portman volunteers to go into the shimmer with a team of four other women, all of whom have volunteered to expose themselves to something that, as far as they know, has killed all but one person who came in contact with it, and left that person an apparent stumbling, mumbling shell of his former self.

While Portman has some background, the others seem less than suited. They have their talents, but Portman’s the only one who looks at home with an M4 in her hands, probably due to her time in the IDF.

Still, brave or afraid, suited or unsuited, they’re embarking on a mission that, on its surface, looks like the absolutely ideal application for heavy ordinance, and we wonder, after three years of sending in troops that never return, why we haven’t dropped a MOAB or something even more powerful on this thing, and we wonder why, since no one knows what the shimmer is, they go into it wearing fatigues instead of biohazard suits.

And then we get to see it, the mysterious and terrifying shimmer. It has the visual impact of rain — which is to say, not much. It looks like a giant CGI soap bubble, and as our heroes step inside— nothing happens! The shimmer doesn’t do its evil in dimensions we can see, it works on a cellular level.

That’s right, a villain we barely see that does things we can’t see at all. Pure cinematic genius. Who greenlit this?

Unless we’re filming a comedy or character study, we need a villain, if we’re trying to appeal to a mass audience our villains must be impressively bad.

The bigger and badder we make our villains, the bigger and better we get to make our heroes; Frankenstein, Dracula, Godzilla, King Kong, Darth Vader, the Joker; definable, dangerous, and something or someone we can engage.

We’ve got to be able to engage our villain. If we can’t fight the villain, it might as well be cancer, a killer, but not a very cinematic one.

No matter how destructive it is, if we can’t engage it, we’re eventually going to depend on an act of god to save us, something even the Greeks tried to avoid.

This is where “Annihilation” breaks down. Our brave, but ill-equipped heroes face dangerous things that aren’t villainous. They’re not evil, just quirks of nature, as in an albino alligator, which they manage to kill before suffering serious casualties, but via which they gather definitive, first hand evidence of never before seen genetic mutations — extra teeth.

Or albino antelope with plant-like antlers, that inspire neither fear, nor awe.

Or, a large, genetically altered bear, that they don’t manage to kill until they take serious casualties, the first of which they suffer due to what will seem to the entire audience inexplicable stupidity. While they have what appears to be a very secure place with great visibility and fields of fire to stand guard, they instead stand guard in a spot with poor visibility, where they’re very exposed.

Heroes don’t have to be geniuses, but they can’t be complete idiots. This is a serious script flaw that causes us to respect and care less for our heroes.

The second casualty results from another script flaw.

Earlier our heroes held back from each other information we each would have shared, which any normal person would have shared immediately, forcing these people to come up with less than credible logic to not share it, and we don’t buy it. These mistakes cause us to not just respect and care less for our heroes, they cause us to believe them less.

In “Ex Machina” Garland’s heroes were supersmart, geniuses, they impressed the hell out of us, they thought of everything, but the villain, the artificial intelligence was even smarter than them. Not here. Our five heroes must be less capable, less heroic because our villain isn’t superior enough.

Whenever your heroes must do stupid things to place themselves in danger you can bet the problem is your villain. Your villain isn’t villainy enough.

And that’s the case here. Our third casualty simply walks away, and the next time we see her she’s a plant with a vaguely human shape, unrecognizable, and with no consciousness. It isn’t comedic — quite. Imagine Mars attacking with ray guns, turning us into daisies, but we don’t get to see the Martians or the ray guns, and there is no reverse ray to reinstate our hero. It can’t be funny because she’s gone, nor can it be frightening, she’s a flowering shrub!

It’s as though our villain is an unseen and unseeable germ, and if our villain is a germ, our story may be novelistic, but it’s not cinematic.

And, because our heroes all come slowly under the effect of the shimmer, they behave woodenly, without energy — which makes for less than great heroes. These are capable actors, but they act as though they’re emotionless, and since all of them do so, again, I’ve got to blame the director, Garland.

When Portman finally encounters the entity that causes the shimmer, we see it as a kind of kaleidoscopic light that gradually shapes itself into her double, after which she kills it with such ease we lose faith in the narrative. We can’t see hundreds of special ops guys failing to do the same thing or, as I said, the USAF not MOABing or napalming the thing to a cinder long ago.

I understand why, after “Ex Machina” Garland probably seemed a good bet, but I’m afraid in “Annihilation”, Portman will have missed her box office target again, through no fault of her own.