In the sci-fi “Annihilation,” director Alex Garland has built a luminous, colorful playground with infinite possibilities. He takes us into a mysterious region called “The Shimmer,” a kaleidoscopic, morphing bubble. Light and technology are all scrambled and refracted inside this ever-expanding space, and the flora and fauna inside are rife with mutations and impossibilities. It’s a place where the rules of nature don’t apply and anything can be imagined.
Early on, “Annihilation” is entrancing, an endlessly fascinating trip in which Garland only begins to scratch the surface of the mysteries The Shimmer holds. But disappointingly, “Annihilation” starts to do all too much. All those wonders and possibilities that were frustratingly withheld become overwhelming. The movie becomes bloodier, weirder, more colorful and more esoteric, and as a result it’s less fun, less interesting, less profound and at times, even dumb.
“Then what do you know?” The movie opens with Lena (Natalie Portman) quarantined in front of a room of researchers. It has a “Westworld” vibe as she’s robotically grilled with questions she has no answers to. She’s describing, to no avail, what she saw in The Shimmer, but the question probes deeper philosophically. “Annihilation” is about what humans think we understand. What do we know for sure, and who are we?
Lena is sent into The Shimmer after her husband (Oscar Isaac) was the first to survive the ordeal of being inside. He’s been missing for a full year, with Lena left only with grief over his disappearance. Garland intercuts the sci-fi story with vignettes of Lena coping with her depression. Once inside The Shimmer, she learns that her whole team is damaged in some way, each of them fighting loss and feelings of self worth. “Almost none of us commit suicide,” says the team leader and psychologist Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh). “But almost all of us self-destruct.”
Garland is aiming high here, using genre story telling as a way to get at more fundamental truths of how people mature, change and look at the world differently in the wake of a tragedy. The Shimmer is described as a prism, where everything inside is refracted and illuminated, often in disturbing or startling ways.
This isn’t an uncommon aspiration for sci-fi. “Arrival” is a similarly great, recent example of how coming face to face with a higher power changes our outlook. But “Annihilation” slowly morphs from a suspenseful mystery to a gruesome monster movie. We see Isaac’s character cutting open the abdomen of his live teammate to reveal a sickening, moving creature replacing his organs. A massive bear-like monster violently attacks Lena’s team, with the bear shrieking in agony with the sound of one of its former victims.
The movie itself is refracting and merging genres, and it creates an ugly, mutated hybrid. The more we find out about The Shimmer, the more impenetrable and confusing the movie gets. Suddenly what was presented as a smart, scientific and studious film starts to look silly when Lena and her team have no clear objective and barely stop to take a sample of what they find. And the film’s finale, a long and extravagantly effects driven display of colors and unreal forms, leaves nothing to the imagination and everything unexplained.
“Annihilation” still operates on simple, psychological themes, despite all its frills. But it doesn’t have the riveting, slow burn tension of Tarkovsky’s “Stalker,” to which “Annihilation” bears a striking resemblance, or even the elegance or curiosity of Garland’s previous film “Ex Machina.” It tries to do all too much and comes refracted out feeling lacking.
2 ½ stars
probably puzzled over this film more than i should have–“tries to do too much”?: but then a lot of my favorite films do (also a lot that don’t that plenty of other people warm up to, or even give oscars to–like, e.g., THE SHAPE OF WATER)–but the very next day saw haneke’s HAPPY END, which immediately cut through the confusion * of course!–the haneke moves minute by minute (well, second by second) and every discrete instance of it counts: not to say it all works (it doesn’t), and not to say it can’t put you to sleep (it can), but you DO know that attention must, or at least ought to be, paid: there’s even a video insert where a critical event occurs and you’re not even sure what part of the frame you should be looking at! * not that there’s any thematic connection, but the point is there’s TOO MUCH in ANNIHILATION we’re expected to let slide past or take at face value: natalie portman toting her assault weapon–does she puzzle over it?: no; do any of her colleagues have equivalent misgivings/anxieties?: not that we (or i) can tell … but they must have been feeling SOMETHING, except we’re really not privy to it * but in the haneke we always are–always, always, always: it all counts, even the borrrrring stuff (AS boring stuff!) * and here i think is where ANNIHILATION fails, where MOST american commercial films fail, in examining the real intricacies of lived experience: not too much, then, but too LITTLE … * but it’s pretty to look at (in that dead, muted glaze of elegance that garland seems to prefer), which DOES count for something … always always always!
ooops!–takes me a while sometimes to catch up with what i THOUGHT i wrote …
the mess at the end of the first line that begins “but then a lot of my favorite …” actually should read “but then a lot of my favorite films do that (also a lot that aren’t that plenty of other people …” blah-blah-blah
so now maybe somebody besides myself will think it actually matters …