Movie Review: ‘Annihilation’
Exploring the neon-colored unknown while delving into our own human frailties
Quick disclaimer: There are some spoilers in this review, if I’ve actually remembered the movie correctly.
Was it all a mass hallucination? Might it have all been the strangest lucid dream you’ve ever had featuring a mutant skull-faced bear with an appropriated human voice box? Or maybe it’s just an interpretive dance piece?
I’ve never dabbled in psychedelics — or any illicit drug for that matter — but from what I could imagine the finale (or the whole) of writer/director Alex Garland’s vaguely adapted film version of Jeff Vandermeer’s novel “Annihilation”, this might have been the closest that I’ll ever get. At the movie’s conclusion the theater sat in stunned silence, still processing what we had all just witnessed. For whatever it was, for all its imperfections, it’s certainly a rarity these days to see scenes or sequences on screen that you’ve genuinely never quite seen before.
Movies as challenging or visual intriguing as this make the best argument for still making your way to a theater to see a movie. I wondered after seeing this, is this what people thought when they saw “2001: A Space Odyssey” on the big screen for the first time? For the record: I’m not saying it’s “2001” but it might be the closest thing we’ll ever get in today’s overwhelmingly franchise-driven movie market.
Army doctor turned biology professor, Lena (Natalie Portman) feels guilty; her special forces husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), has been gone on a super-secret mission for over a year, and she (and we) assumes the worst. What does she feel guilty about? Well, moving on, I guess, and maybe one other thing in particular that we find out more about as the movie progresses. Just as she’s about to effect the smallest bit of change in her life, like painting their old bedroom, guess who just happens to show up… Kane. He’s certainly not acting like himself, but if it looks like a Kane, and talks like a Kane, it must be him, right? He can’t remember where he was, or what he was doing, or how he got back home, and it also turns he’s really sick too. But, as Lena and “hey all of my organs are failing” Kane are speeding their way to the hospital, they’re intercepted by the ever ominous black government SUVs.
The central conceit of “Annihilation” is that an extraterrestrial object has crashed into an lighthouse on the edge of a coastal national park, Area X. Following the crash, a shimmering bioluminescence dome forms around the site then slowly begins to creep outward, strangely and irrevocably altering whatever is within its perimeter — splicing, reflecting, or mutating everything from the smallest flowers to the largest animals. The government has sent in several expeditions since the discovery of the phenomenon but nothing has ever come out. Period. Well, that is at least until Lena’s husband, Kane. Now the “Southern Reach” — the government organization in charge of observing and researching what’s called “the Shimmer” — are looking for some answers from the both of them, hence the black SUVs.
Welp, what does this all mean? I guess that means it’s time to send in another ill-fated expedition team. On this occasion it’s comprised of all women, purportedly because women are less susceptible to the strange influences of the Shimmer. Each member of its team has a specific skill set: a biologist (the aforementioned Natalie Portman), a psychologist (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a paramedic (Gina Rodriguez), a physicist (Tessa Thompson) and a magnetologist (Tuva Novotny). Lena, who’s volunteered herself, is seeking to learn what happen to her husband and what may have driven him into accepting this seemingly suicidal mission.
So who would sign-up to walk into the unknowable from which only one person has ever come back? Broken, lonely people looking for answers? Well, we are all broken in some manner, maybe some more so than others: a terminal cancer, the loss of a child, addiction, depression, or infidelity. Not only do each of the team members have certain skills that they bring to bear but also these and other underlining burdens. As they attempt to make their way to the original crash site, will each choose to let themselves be consumed by those malities or will they come out the other side having faced them? But, as in everyday life, no one ever really walks away from anything unscathed.
Alex Garland has created another essential scientific humanist spectacle in the vain of his first film as a director, 2015’s “Ex Machina.” Oscillating from the sometimes gruesome to mind-altering psychedelia, “Annihilation” elaborates on Vandermeer’s original prose and adds a much needed subtext to his mostly atmospheric novel about a natural phenomenon which has run amok. Garland on more than one occasion spells out his own thematic fulcrum that everything in the movie hinges on, self-destruction, or rather some of our own tendencies towards it, either by biological imperative or our own psychology. An idea that imbues this movie with a heady context to what probably some studio executives thought would be a more marketable and straightforward piece of sci-fi/horror.
