Paramount Pictures
Writer / director Alex Garland is no stranger to the sci-fi genre having scripted many well-regarded titles including 28 Days Later, Sunshine (a personal favorite), and Dredd, and both wrote and directed the modern science fiction classic Ex Machina. Garland returns four years after that film’s release, again wearing both hats, with Annihilation, which is based on the first of the ‘Southern Reach’ trilogy of books by Jeff VanderMeer — which had been considered unfilmable.
The story of Annihilation is fairly straightforward: Something, apparently from the outer reaches of space, has crashed on earth, hitting a lighthouse, creating some sort of ‘barrier’ that scientists have dubbed The Shimmer. For three years, as The Shimmer’s perimeter expands, scientific and military teams have been sent in to investigate but no one has ever returned (a departure from the book where some teams have returned). Until one day Kane (Oscar Isaac) shows up at home to the surprise of his wife Lena (Natalie Portman) after having been missing for a year. Lena had no idea where or what his mission was (they are both military, although she is now a college professor), but when it’s clear he’s very sick she tries to get him to a hospital only to be converged upon by what seems to be a Black Ops team.
Lena wakes up in a medical facility where she is greeted by Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who makes Lena question her sanity at first but is quickly brought up to speed on The Shimmer and the condition of her husband — and neither of them come with any positives. Lena interacts with some other women at the facility who, it turns out, are the next team of volunteers chosen to enter The Shimmer to find out what exactly hit the lighthouse, with Dr. Ventress leading the team. Lena volunteers because as a biologist she believes what she finds inside can ultimately help save her husband. But the journey is fraught with mental and physical dangers from time loss to weirdly mutated plants and animals. And of course not everyone will survive the journey but Lena is determined to get back. Will she find any real answers to her questions?
Annihilation has had its own struggles getting to the big screen, being the last movie produced at Paramount under the former regime and the current regime not really knowing what to do with it. As with The Cloverfield Paradox, the film very nearly went right to Netflix (as it will across the globe in April) before the studio decided on a US theatrical release (perhaps due to overwhelmingly positive critical reaction), and there were disagreements between the studio and director on the pacing of the film and some of the performances, allegedly ordering reshoots that the director refused to do. (One could assume the reaction to Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, also released by Paramount, weighed heavily on the studio when a second ‘art house’ film was in the pipeline.) But with a $40 million budget, the studio shouldn’t have a lot to worry about.
And with that budget, Garland has given us a film that looks stunning. The interior of The Shimmer, with its lush flora and haunting fauna all seen through a soap bubble lens, is something to behold. Garland and his team have brought some truly stunning images to the screen, particularly the landscape surrounding the lighthouse. There are some fearsome beasts as well, including a huge genetically altered alligator and a truly horrifying bear that attacks the team in a scene that may be even more terrifying than the bear attack in The Revenant. Seriously.
Garland builds tension throughout the story as the effects of The Shimmer begin to impact the various team members (and credit must be given for Garland not making the team’s gender an issue), and as Lena discovers some disturbing truths about The Shimmer and what happened to her husband. But Garland isn’t interested in giving you any easy answers about The Shimmer or Lean’s fate. Is the organism from space a sentient creature hellbent on taking over the planet, or was its impact on Earth just a cosmic accident? There are plenty of echoes of past sci-fi films like The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Andromeda Strain and Alien that help make the story accessible without being derivative, but the movie’s final moments will leave everything open to conversation afterwards, and that’s a good thing (my interpretation, based on Lena’s vocation of cell study, is that this organism is something like a virus or a cancer introduced into the ecosystem and altering the existing cells). Be prepared for some healthy debates!
Annihilation may not be to everyone’s tastes but it is a visually arresting, intensely thought-provoking film that expects more from the viewer than the average sci-fi spectacle. Paramount may have little confidence in it, but I suspect this will be right up there with Garland’s Ex Machina as a movie people continue to talk about even years after its release.
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