Paramount/Science Fiction /115 mins
For one man’s opinion of Annihilation, director Alex Garland’s follow-up to his Oscar winning Ex Machina, just ask the guy who runs the studio that made it. He apparently doesn’t like it. Or, more accurately, Jim Gianopulos, Paramount’s fairly new Chairman and CEO, doesn’t think you’ll like it because test audiences reportedly found it too intellectual, something any good filmmaker should take as a compliment. The poor testing resulted in a feud between Annihilation producer Scott Rudin and Executive Producer David Ellison. Paramount eventually said “screw it” and offloaded foreign distribution to Netflix, leaving the Melrose Ave. studio to handle only the U.S., Canada and China. Gianopulos’ hair trigger also landed Paramount’s The Cloverfield Paradox on Netflix where it surprised everyone by streaming immediately after the conclusion of Super Bowl LII. One can see the reasoning there: that movie was dreadful and the resulting deal was a financial win for Paramount and a marketing win for Netflix even if it was a creative win for nobody. On top of all that, we add a dash of palace intrigue: Annihilation was greenlit by Gianopulos’ predecessor, Brad Grey, which might also account for its ill treatment by the new regime. All this is to point out that one film was dumped by Paramount because it’s bad, the other was dumped by Paramount despite being good, with a level of sophistication that the studio thinks most of the world is too fat and happy on superhero fare to appreciate.
So, audiences in the U.S., Canada and China, here’s your chance to prove to Hollywood that challenging, mid-budgeted sci-fi can be profitable and you’re not just re-watching Game of Thrones on your laptop while waiting around for the next Marvel extravaganza. Indeed, treat yourself to Annihilation, a stunning and screw-tightening blend of awe and dread that sees Garland secure his place in the top ranks of genre filmmakers.
In some of his previous screenplays, Garland cleverly amalgamated various genre influences, most notably in the Tarkovsky-esque Sunshine, a potent mix-tape of sci-fi inspirations. Annihilation, which Garland adapted from the first novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy, is a riveting and often unnerving combination of head trip sci-fi on the order of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stalker and high-end, Ten Little Indians-style creature feature like Alien and The Thing.
The recent film that Annihilation most resembles, in feel and ambition, is 2016’s brilliant Arrival. The crucial difference, and here’s where Annihilation could have been an even bigger knockout, is that the emotional journey of Amy Adams’ character, Louise, folds elegantly and powerfully into Arrival’s sci-fi elements. That film wasn’t really about aliens, it was about Louise learning to choose joy despite knowing the future result of that choice will be pain. Annihilation can’t get us to invest in its main character as much, even if her story is also tragic. Lena (Natalie Portman) is a Johns Hopkins biology professor and combat veteran who continues to mourn her soldier-husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac) one year after he went MIA on a mysterious mission. When he suddenly appears in Lena’s bedroom, he is disoriented and blank-faced. Sitting at their dining room table, his body half out of frame to suggest his compromised state, Kane starts coughing up blood and is rushed, along with Lena, to a Florida research facility.
With Kane near death, Lena is informed by martini dry psychologist Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) that the answer to what happened to her husband lies inside the Shimmer, an enigmatic, translucent, presumably alien, Day-Glo-colored curtain draped over a swampy area near the Florida coast. As the Shimmer is slowly expanding and will eventually swallow populated areas, the government has sent numerous teams into the zone to investigate its origin and purpose. No one has returned, except Kane. So Lena, along with Ventress, physicist Josie (Thor: Ragnarok’s Tessa Thompson), anthropologist Cass (Tuva Novotny) and paramedic Anya (Jane the Virgin’s Gina Rodriguez) suit up in full army gear and into the Shimmer they go.
While the set-up may smack of a standard platoon adventure, Annihilation is anything but. The suspense is fairly unrelenting and the mystery of what’s inside the Shimmer increases the deeper they travel with “no compass, no comms, no coordinates.” What’s not a mystery is why these particular five (huzzuh to Garland for making next-to-nothing out of the platoon being all-female) were chosen for a presumed suicide mission. All are “damaged goods”, victims of personal tragedy, from which a theme emerges: our inclination towards emotional and physical self-destruction and how it forces us to evolve into a new, sometimes scary, form of ourself. The process of cells being broken down and remade (note the shot of Lena reading of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) is key to whatever the heck is happening in the Shimmer. Sometimes the results, courtesy of DP Rob Hardy’s color-streaked images, are striking. A fawn sprouts pink flowers from its horns, crystal structures rise from the sand (a visual that reminds us of 1985’s The Quiet Earth). But even at its most visually arresting, Garland, helped by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s throbbing score, keeps us on edge. Something curious or terrifying is probably around the corner, whether a physical threat or the result of the platoon’s slow mental breakdown.
To appreciate Annihilation is to give yourself over to it. The images and the mystery cast a hypnotic spell, broken up by intense bursts of body horror and violence. Natalie Portman, focused yet vulnerable, carries the team and the audience along, but it’s Gina Rodriguez who really impresses, especially during an intense scene when her unhinged threats against the squad are interrupted by a terrifying creature whose screams sound suspiciously like one of their dead comrades.
Annihilation is an intoxicating and unnerving sci-fi offering, one whose images tease and stimulate, more than confuse and create distance. Lena and the other scientists trained in rational thought find themselves in an environment where rational thought and the rules of natural order will only get them so far. And it all comes to a head at a lighthouse on the shore, the epicenter of the phenomenon. Inside, the twisty tunnels, creepy skeleton and, sitting right there in middle, video camera give us all the answers we need…or possibly no answer at all (this is a no-spoiler zone, folks). That’s up to the viewer, the baggage he or she brings to the theater and the amount of work he or she wants to invest in deciphering the conclusion. Unlike the meaning of its phantasmagorical ending, Annihilation’s triumph as a sensory experience is not up for debate. Like the Shimmer and its ability to break down and remake DNA, Garland has broken down and remade the DNA of speculative sci-fi into something ravishing and terrifying. Even if the film lives so far inside its own head that it loses sight of its characters, the apocalypse has never looked so beautiful.