Annihilation
Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina” did not get a proper review from me when I finally watched it on DVD in 2015- that will change in the coming months. In the run-up to watching his follow-up, “Annihilation,” I’ve actually wanted to revisit his 2007 sci-fi film with Danny Boyle, “Sunshine,” but haven’t had the opportunity; that will also happen in the coming months. With “Ex Machina,” Garland solidified himself as an intelligent and intriguing voice in the science fiction genre to watch, and what I saw, and heard, of “Annihilation” made me especially curious for what he would do for an encore. Suffice it to say, he delivered another fascinating journey into the realm of ideas and images in cinematic science fiction, although I don’t know how successful he was.
A couple of months ago, the hosts of the ’80s All Over podcast brought up “Annihilation” in conjunction with Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” in terms of comparison, and if you know my love of Tarkovsky (and especially, his 1979 epic), that’s something that is going to make me pay attention to a film. But “Annihilation” stands, very much, on its own as a genre piece, and Garland has the brains and cinematic brawn to pull it off. Here, he is adapting a novel by Jeff VanderMeer, although I’ve heard it’s a rather liberal adaptation. The film centers around Lena (Natalie Portman), a former soldier, and current biologist, who finds herself joining a team of scientists in entering The Shimmer, a mysterious location that popped up three years prior when something landed at a lighthouse. The area that makes up The Shimmer has been expanding, but Lena is drawn to it for another reason: her husband, a soldier himself (Kane, played by Oscar Issac), has returned after being missing for almost a year- he was a part of one of the last teams to go into The Shimmer, but something is not quite right about him. They get taken to Area X, the base researching The Shimmer, and Lena convinces the leader of the next team, Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to let her join the group going in (Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny and Tessa Thompson) to investigate.
Comparing a moving to “Stalker” leads to certain expectations for me, but the truth is, this has a style and structure all its own, to go along with a story that has plenty of interesting ideas, although it has a hard time really landing on what those ideas lead to. I really like a lot of the film’s direction, but the emotional components that would make this really work aren’t really there. We don’t feel the connection between Lena and Kane the way we should when Garland flashbacks to them before Kane leaves for his deployment to The Shimmer. Of course, that’s because they aren’t as connected as a husband and wife should be, as Lena has been having an affair with a colleague (David Gyasi), and while that is used as part of the reason why Kane, who is aware that no one comes out of The Shimmer, would go on a one-way mission inside it, it feels like a miscalculation if the film is set to have any emotional impact as Lena discovers the truths that lie within The Shimmer. I kept thinking of “Arrival,” which used the emotional pain Amy Adams’s character felt as she experienced visions she thought she understood to bring that film to a crescendo with its ideas; Garland just cannot make it work like that film could, or even like he did in “Ex Machina,” and it makes the film feel more restless than it should, because damn does this have some great ideas in it.
Even if I feel like Garland is still refining his voice as a sci-fi writer, his ability to deliver sci-fi images is well-honed, and on par with the masters like Tarkovsky. The cinematography by Rob Hardy as the team goes into The Shimmer is a striking use of lighting to evoke the proper effect, and the way he shoots the production design by Mark Digby is as haunting as some of the things Digby creates, like tree branches and flowers that grow in the shape of humans. One of the ideas that Garland digs fully into as a writer is the idea that The Shimmer is a living, breathing place that collects samples of the life within it, and shifts and re-configures those samples into new organisms, and it’s the key to the film’s appeal as a narrative. Like The Zone in “Stalker,” like the alien in John Carptenter’s “The Thing,” The Shimmer adapts to its surroundings, and uses what those surroundings give it to make something new, and adaptable for hunting and survival. There are times during the team’s journey in The Shimmer when it is an effective splicing of psychological and physical horror, and philosophical ruminations on our sense of our own mortality, that take it to the upper reaches of the genre, and Garland and his collaborators, including his great visual effects team and composers Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, make those moments count as they build to a climax that is striking in its visual impact, and complicated in its intellectual one. In his film, the word annihilation doesn’t necessarily mean what we think it means. In this case, it means to destroy and rebuild into something new. It doesn’t always succeed, but “Annihilation” does present much that is new, as well as difficult to shake.
