Maybe I Just Don’t Get ‘Annihilation’
The first time I watched Annihilation something didn’t quite click with me. Maybe it was because it felt a bit like two movies clumsily stuck together with staples and duct tape, or because the visual aspect of the film was equal parts ugly and pretty (which I didn’t think could happen). I still think a lot of the flaws which bothered me the first time around are there, but there was a lot more I picked up on the second time around which elevated it for me.
For one, it’s a really ambitious film. Alex Garland is clearly a talented writer/director, and he’s got the films to prove it. He touches on themes of identity, self-destruction, humanity’s relationship with nature and does a pretty decent job of conveying them throughout the film. Wrapping this all up in high-concept sci-fi in the form of the Shimmer, and then trying to use it and all the weird shit inside it as metaphors for these themes is worthy of praise in itself.
Really, there are a lot of individual elements in the film which I think work really well. The cast, for one, is solid. Gina Rodriguez, in particular, shines, inhibiting a role quite different from her breakthrough in Jane The Virgin without much difficulty at all. Some of the shots in the film are beautiful. The designs of the creatures and mutations are creative and colourful. But the biggest issue is that all of these individual features feel a little underdeveloped. Most of the cast, though they give good performances, feel underutilised. Tessa Thompson’s Josie Redak is a good example here; though her character’s backstory and motivations are very much in line with the film’s main thematic thrust of self-destruction and loss of identity, she’s underwritten and underserved, robbing her of any real impactful moments in the film.
The cinematography leaves me confused as to what exactly Garland and Rob Hardy were trying to do. I found the film disjointed and hard to follow the first time I watched it, but I attributed it to me being tired and not paying attention. The second time I realised that the film is just purposely shot and edited in the most confusing, deliberately ugly way. Shots cut into one another with no regard for motion or eye lines, characters get lost because there’s no consistent sense of space and slow dialogue scenes are cut like action scenes, holding shots for split seconds. Sure it’s probably on purpose and meant to tie into the disorienting nature of The Shimmer, but it just makes the whole film stressful to watch. That’s without mentioning the unnecessarily washed-out, blinding whites, and the ugly faux-HDR shots which plague the film and make it look like a cheap student film rather than a proper blockbuster.
But the biggest issue is that I don’t feel as though there’s quite enough substance in the first 90% of the film to justify the purposely-vague, dreamlike ending. Sure, there’s subtext and metaphors and thematic messaging, but none of it really pulls together well enough, or at least the film doesn’t make enough of an effort to frame them with focus and clarity for the ending to make sense.
Annihilation isn’t a bad film, but I think it stumbles enough that it ends up being far from a great film, and barely a good one. Still worth a watch.
