I would not dare delve into it, only to say that it’s one of the sci-fi thriller’s many searing images. The pacing, while appropriate for the story, gives the film a largely lackadaisical feel.
Advertisement
“Yes, this is the kind of film where you might find yourself turning to your movie-mate and whispering ‘How GREAT is this!’ just as your companion is putting the popcorn under the seat and is about to suggest cutting your losses and getting the heck out of there [.] The world inside the contaminated zone is alternately horrifying and lovely”. As he did in “Ex Machina”, Garland exhibits exquisite taste in manifesting the Shimmer, as well as the fecund Florida swampland it’s overtaking with disquieting efficiency. That’s the mark of a true Thumbs Up.
Annihilation is an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s bestselling trilogy of novels, Southern Reach, which have a huge fan following, but many believe the story to be untransferable to the big screen. That just wouldn’t be like me.
The film introduces us to Lena, played by Natalie Portman, a biology teacher at John Hopkins.
She must confront the memory of her husband again and again as she traces his journey through steps that have fragmented, rooted and rot.
Three years ago, a odd cloud that resembles shimmering oil in water (ingeniously named the “Shimmer”) engulfed a chunk of coastline and has been expanding inland ever since. That she also looks startlingly real as an ex-soldier precisely handling a high-powered automatic rifle is also a little shocking, and gives her Lena a unsafe edge that makes the unfolding events credible and even thrilling. Jennifer Jason Leigh is an all-time fave of mine, and part of what I love about her is a sort of stubborn, flinty quality. The trip is laced with trepidation, with one member calling it a “suicide mission”. The characters enter the Shimmer knowing zilch. Several military teams have already been sent in to explore this mysterious and unsafe biosphere.
Cue the all-woman team that Lana joins to investigate The Shimmer. The females are never used as a punchline or even an excuse. So why do they mess up that great job they have or that relationship? What a way to start out 2018 at the movies. Where Portman struggles is as the bad ass with a machine gun. “If the global Finance-Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging the peoples of the earth once again into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of earth, and thus a Jewish victory, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe”. It happens! It shouldn’t mean that they simply stop taking risks on idiosyncratic filmmakers – or that when the results are a movie as unique as Annihilation, they decide it’s not worth their trouble.
The rest of Annihilation is also highly intriguing, most notably in the visuals department (which are even more impressive considering the budget is slim but with effects that put some major blockbusters to shame). I won’t pretend I grasped everything that transpired, seeing that I don’t have a college degree in microbiology. It’s just like, Oh, I drink a little too much!
Many people will despise this movie. They’re reportedly reeling from a poor test screening last summer, after which co-financier David Ellison expressed concerns that the film was “too intellectual” and “too complicated”, and y’know, his company made Geostorm and Terminator: Genysis, so he knows when things are too intellectual and complicated. The mind-melding plot twists make Mother! look like Fifty Shades Freed.
Speaking to press in Canada, just before the whitewashing criticism emerged, Garland discussed his decision to work on a female-led film – something still rare in Hollywood, where women are underrepresented.
“Annihilation” may strike some viewers as a hybrid of “Arrival” (2016) and “Alien” (1979), but it’s very much its own thing – a science-fiction flick that’s at once intellectually ambitious and extremely frightening. It’s frustrating when the dots don’t connect. The occasional use of lens flaring is also a nice way of reminding us what vivid nightmare these characters are stuck inside.
Advertisement
What’s also different is the relative lack of whiplash-inducing editing, overblown audio/visual diarrhea often associated with modern sci-fi – the long stretches of silence, minimal dialogue, and the challenging of the audience to think on their own and not to be force-fed explanations or conclusions. Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson ably play two friendly younger scientists who-because of the Shimmer, or due to their own secretly troubled minds-gradually reveal darker sides.
