Tagline:
Fear What’s Inside

Wide Release Date:
February 23, 2018

Directed by:
Alex Garland
Screenplay by:
Alex Garland
Based on the novel by:
Jeff VanderMeer
Produced by:
Scott Rudin, Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich, Eli Bush

Starring:
Natalie Portman
Jennifer Jason Leigh
Gina Rodriguez
Tessa Thompson
Tuva Novotny
Oscar Isaac

PREGAME THOUGHTS

I watched and sorta liked Devs. I watched and loved Ex Machina. It was time to plumb the psyche of Alex Garland further and try out Annihilation. I read nothing about the movie before going into it. It could be about dancing ponies for all I know! I don’t even know who stars in it. Jeff Bridges? Ken Jennings? My 12th grade physics teacher Mr. Morrison? I can’t wait to find out.

THE 700(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

The film begins with Lena (Natalie Portman) undergoing an interrogation. A professor and a former army soldier, Lena volunteered to be part of an operation to investigate a region known as “the Shimmer”. It was created from a meteor that landed on a lighthouse! The area of the Shimmer is gradually and persistently expanding. Lena was the only member of her troop to return from the Shimmer, as was her husband Kane (Óscar Isaac) from his own troop after disappearing for a year.

THEY USED TO BE SO HAPPY. SOME OF THEM HAPPY AND WITH A TERRIBLE TATTOO.

Lena can’t answer much of the interrogator’s questions. Kane, similarly, before Lena embarks on her own Shimmer journey, does not know what happened to him or how he came back. When Kane starts coughing up blood for some reason, Lena calls for an ambulance and they get intercepted by people who take them to a secret facility. Kane goes into intensive care while Lena talks to Dr. No-First-Name Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who hella wants to investigate the Shimmer herself. Lena agrees to join her on the expedition, along with a team of three other science-type women: Anya (Gina Rodriguez), Josie (Tessa Thompson), and Cassie (Tuva Novotny). They’re all gonna get pretty fucked.

Crazy stuff happens in the Shimmer. For one thing, they all wake up with two days worth of missing memories. Eventually, they discover mutated plants and animals, such as what appears to be strangely cross-bred flowers and giant alligators with many extra rows of teeth. Eventually, the group happens upon an abandoned military base that Kane’s group had also stayed at during their own expedition. There, the women discover a camera with a video showing Kane cutting open an awake fellow soldier’s abdomen, revealing intestines that are moving around disgustingly within. They also discover a skeletonized body against a wall that appears to have been mutated with algae. Although thoroughly unsettled, the group decides to stay at the base that night and take turns keeping watch. It doesn’t work. Cassie gets dragged off and killed by a mutant bear. Whoops!

The next morning, the troop presses on. They discover a bunch of weird bushes that have grown into humanoid shapes. Tessa has realized that the Shimmer is distorting and spreading DNA like a prism distorts and spreads light. And they are caught within the phenomenon.

Wanna bone those sexy trees…

Anya starts getting paranoid and weird and, in the middle of the night while sleeping in a little village house, she ties Lena, Ventress, and Josie to chairs and threatens to kill them. In the most tense and creepy scene of the movie, a mutant bear that appears to have absorbed Cassie’s voice enters the house and moseys around sinisterly. The bear ends up killing Anya while Josie breaks free from the chair and shoots the bear. Like, far out, man.

This write-up is already getting kind of long. Josie somehow deliberately refracts her DNA through that of a plant and slips off into the woods to die or turn into a tree or something, leaving Lena and Ventress alone to discover and enter the ground zero lighthouse. Ventress slips away into a hole created by the meteor while Lena discovers a burned skeleton against a wall and a videotape showing Kane killing himself with a phosphorus grenade (with another Kane stepping into the frame). Lena then finds Ventress in the hole raving about the Shimmer and how it’s going to take over everything before she explodes in a weird burst of light and turns into some floating fractal eyeball. I’m serious about this.

Ugh, blugh, …fucking Taco Bell…

The fractal eyeball absorbs a drop of Lena’s blood, and soon a humanoid copy of Lena appears that mimics almost every one of her movements like a mirror image. This scene literally lasts forever until Lena gives up and tricks the mime into blowing itself up with one of Kane’s leftover grenades while it almost transforms into a complete Lena copy. The lighthouse begins burning down, and original Lena flees.

Interrogation is done for now! Lena visits Kane in the intensive care unit and asks if he’s really Kane. Kane doesn’t know. He asks if she’s Lena. She doesn’t answer. They hug. Both their eyes flicker.

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — General Movie Thoughts

I was pretty disappointed with this one. A lot of it felt like a Stargate SG-1 episode where the team investigates some weird, otherworldly planet and find some weird, otherworldly bullshit and put themselves in weird, otherworldly (and dangerous) situations. The difference here is that everyone dies! No one dies in Stargate SG-1, they just ascend to higher planes of existence like assholes.

At its core, the movie is about exactly what Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character talks about during that one monologue: self-destruction. Busted relationships, self-harm, taking unnecessary risks. Depression. Grief. Loss. Nothing positive, that’s for sure! The “shimmer” and everything about it is a metaphor for change. People are self-destructive and usually die in the shimmer. Those who return from the shimmer are changed and don’t know how to process the change. They don’t know if they’re the same person anymore. Kane returns as if shell-shocked from war. Lena returns without any sense of self. In the case of Annihilation, though, it’s both figurative and literal. In this way, the story is pretty clever.

But, also, some of it was stupid. The means to make the self-destruction theme literal involved plot devices like “the light refracting in the shimmer is mixing up all the genetic material” — a metaphor for the notion that we are not just an entity of ourselves, but an amalgam of the bits and pieces we take from other people. This is also literally presented by the tattoo that keeps jumping from arm to arm, ending up on Lena’s by the end. Also, the whole scene where Dr. Ventress explodes into a weird fractal that absorbs Lena’s blood, creating a miming copy of her body, was bizarre. Lena’s whole encounter with it and blowing it up with a phosphorus grenade, plus the aftermath, dragged on for far, far too long. Much of the movie was enjoyable, but this last half hour was a real slog. I’ll give my interpretations in Topic 2.

WHAT’S UP, SLENDERMAN!

TOPIC 2 — The Ending

Oh, here we are already! I’m going to try to make sense of the ending based on my own interpretations and smatterings of other people’s mental spewings that I’ve read online.

Let’s start with Dr. Ventress, who has cancer. If she’s terminal, and it’s implied that she is, that makes her change irrevocable. She can’t come out of the shimmer a different person because she’s destined to die anyway. Therefore, obviously, for very clear reasons, she explodes in a supernova of light and turns into a weird fractal eyeball. Next, we see the fractal eyeball absorb a bit of Lena’s blood — the DNA necessary to create some weird Charlie Kelly Green Man that is, for all intents and purposes, identical to Lena. They spend quite a bit of time getting to know one another before the entity morphs into a Lena copy. Then one of them blows the other up in a mess of fire and light and burns down the lighthouse with it. But since the movie ends with Lena’s eyes flickering a different color, we don’t know who actually survives this explosion.

Yes, I just rewrote the ending. Throughout the movie you see the characters struggle with their inner demons. Lena’s cheating, Kane’s military expeditions, Ventress’ cancer.

How did I do? Did I understand any of the movie?

No?

Very well, then. As you were.

I understood the terrifying mutant bears, though!

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

Director Alex Garland decided not to reread the novel “Annihilation.” Instead, he decided to adapt it “like a dream of the book.”
This is a nicer way of saying that he didn’t want to put any effort into more research for his movie adaptation. My dream of the book involved elves and kicking down the Slurpee machines at 7-Eleven while my children screamed occult nonsense at me. Here’s my movie about it!

Prior to its release, the film drew some criticism for the casting of Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh as characters who are, in the books, described as Asian and half-Native American. Alex Garland explained that none of the five female characters’ ethnicity is revealed in the first book, which is the only one of the trilogy he has read, and that the script was actually complete before the second book was published.
A convenient sequence of events for Alex Garland! Kudos! How would he know that none of the characters’ ethnicity is revealed in the first book when he barely remembers it? In my dream of the book, the characters’ ethnicities are mentioned every twenty-two words over the course of the book’s 9,115 pages.

Another bit of trivia: The last time Natalie Portman held a gun was in Léon the Professional. Maybe. I made that up!

IS IT WORTH A WATCH?

I think this is one of those movies where your mileage may vary heavily. I personally didn’t like it as much as Ex Machina, not even close. But maybe you will! Maybe I’m too dumb to really, and I mean really, grasp all the nuances and metaphors that dwell within Annihilation‘s creamy goodness.

What’s the next Alex Garland film? Looks like it’s Men, whatever that is. I wonder if it has any women in it.