Annihilation: Review, Analysis, Thoughts & Musings

Annihilation is exactly the kind of intellectual science-fiction/horror film I love. By turns poignant, beautiful, mesmerizing, terrifying, wondrous (sometimes simultaneously), Alex Garland's follow up to Ex Machina is a tremendous achievement.

WARNING! - SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT

In 2015, longtime novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland (The Beach, Sunshine, 28 Days Later, Dredd) made his (official) directing debut with Ex Machina, a coldly intimate story about an inventor who contrives to put one of his creations to the Turing Test.

Ex Machina (which I liked quite a lot) was like a filmed stage play, due to the low budget and intellectual bent of the material. At the same time, Garland seemed constrained on both an emotional and imaginative level, and so the end result was tense and heady, but frankly a bit sterile.

Intellectual and sterile (to varying degrees) are characteristics of Garland's previous works, and Annihilation is no different. However, in this case, I think the larger canvas of the story and budget has loosened Garland on a visual and emotional level.

I loved Annihilation. Which makes the behind-the-scenes drama between producers Scott Rudin & David Ellison, as well as Paramount's handling of the film's theatrical release all the more tragic.

More below the jump...

How Long Were You In There?

Natalie Portman plays Lena, a former soldier tuned biologist who specializes in cellular studies at Johns Hopkins University. She's also a grieving wife, whose husband soldier Kane (Oscar Isaac) has been missing in action for about a year on an undisclosed mission.

One night, as she repaints her bedroom, he appears in the house. But something about him is... off. His memory is gone, and he becomes suddenly, violently ill. As she rides with him to the hospital in an ambulance, Lena and Kane are abducted by a paramilitary force. Lena is given a heavy sedative which renders her unconscious.

When Lena awakes, the psychologist Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) informs her that her husband is in a coma, and reveals she is at a base called the "Southern Reach." This base is monitoring an expanding field of something called "The Shimmer" which started years previously when an asteroid hit a lighthouse in the area. All attempts to probe The Shimmer have proven useless, and all teams which have attempted to probe The Shimmer have vanished - with the exception of Kane.

Lena decides to join an all woman team to enter The Shimmer, with the hope of finding the information which can save her husband. Joining her and Ventress are the paramedic Anya (Gina Rodriguez), physicist Josie (Tessa Thompson), and surveyor/geologist Cass (Tuva Novotny).

Once inside The Shimmer, the women discover a place which is fundamentally incompatible with the known world, in unexpectedly beautiful and terrifying ways.

The Shimmer Is A Prism, But It Refracts Everything

I've seen multiple theories on what Annihilation means over the last few days, and there's merit to each idea. One reviewer wrote about it as a visualization of what cancer feels like. Another wrote about it as a metaphor for depression or other mental illnesses. I also read (or heard - can't remember where) the entire film is a construct of Lena's mind -  the result of her guilt and shame about an affair with a colleague. All these theories are valid readings of the film. I'm frankly not concerned with which one is correct - and it's a big part why I think this film is legitimately great.

The Shimmer (called Area X in the novel) refers to the primary setting for the story. As the team progresses into The Shimmer, they become increasingly disoriented. Time loses all meaning. Memory is fractured. Compasses and radios don't work. The team discovers that all life inside The Shimmer is experiencing mutations of what where believed to be incompatible genetic types. For instance, flowers cross pollinate, alligators have the dental features of sharks, and moss grows in colorfully bizarre forms. The further they go into The Shimmer, the worse the mutations get and the faster they happen.

This is when Josie recognizes that The Shimmer is refracting everything, including DNA, into new and mysterious forms - often incompatible with the existing form. New life is created from the destruction of existing life - annihilation as we know it. Some of the mutations are beautiful, and some are terrifying.

Refraction is the bending of light through a prism, which produces a visual distortion. In this film, the theme is expressed as how these characters are subtly but irrevocably changed from what they've always known prior to The Shimmer, into something different - not necessarily in a good or evil way. Nature is nature, life does its own things; some terrible, some beautiful, and sometimes beauty and terror are merged. What's so terrifying about The Shimmer is that, unlike the swamps of the Deep South, it operates by no known rules, other than constant change.

Going back to cancer as a metaphor - it's explicitly discussed early in the film by Lena with a group of students. I don't think the film is specifically about cancer, but this opening conversation about cancer cells, how they continue to divide when they shouldn't, and how they're a mutation of existing genetic information is something of a Rosetta Stone for the film. Also, Garland also repeatedly uses diffusion or refraction to clue the audience into what's happening within The Shimmer. Windows, computer monitors, clear plastic, glasses of water are all used to provide clues about how to watch this film.

Annihilation is largely about how our minds and bodies are turned against us. It's about how that process can be expressed in infinite ways, caused by infinite sources from without and from within, and how impossible it may be for others to see or understand it until it's too late. This also leads into questions of identity and existence - how much can we change and still remain ourselves?

This has long been fertile ground for science fiction and horror films.

Isn't Self-Destruction Coded Into Us?

Lena presents a second crucial idea in the beginning of the film - the idea that aging (and therefore death) is a genetic defect in our cells. In other words, we are hard-wired to self-destruct after a certain point in our lives. Change is part of our natural order. Ironically, though change for humans is self-evident, we also tend to be stubborn and resistant to change - especially when it's as rapid as the changes The Shimmer produces.

When change happens like this, it's nothing short of terrifying. Which is also why we're so resistant to it, even if it's the only way forward.

This idea is re-contextualized on a different level during a conversation between Ventress and Lena at the abandoned base. Ventress discusses self-destruction on an ego/id level, as the perfect job you don't keep, the marriage which fails when you have an affair, and so on. This is moment in the film where the parallel of The Shimmer and mental illness comes to its fullest expression.

What is made clear over the course of the film is that everyone we see enter The Shimmer is on a path to self-destruction, or has flirted with self-destruction over time in their lives. Going further, as The Shimmer refracts these women and changes them, their self-destructive tendencies are given free vent. Interestingly, these characters' self-destruction also carries some parallels with the 5 Stages of Grief formulated by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

Those stages are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. I think each of the women represents a stage of grief which also reflects their personal traumas in some fashion.

• Denial is Anya, a woman who in her life as a medic was also an addict. She becomes increasingly characterized by her refusal to accept the realty of the situation. Her mind is unable to square the changes she sees in herself with who she believes herself to be. Without the outlet of drugs/alcohol, she falls into paranoid rage and is violently killed by the mutant bear.
• Anger is Ventress, a woman whose body is ravaged by cancer (again change we cannot see but is within us), whose mind is ravaged by memory of the people she's sent into The Shimmer only to disappear, and who wants answers delivered in a manner she can contextualize.
• Bargaining is Lena, ravaged by the guilt and shame of her infidelity to her husband, which she comes to realize is part of what led him to accept the mission into The Shimmer in the first place. If only she can go in, maybe she can find a cure for him. She's desperate to right a wrong at any cost to herself.
• Depression is Cass. She acts subdued in almost every moment she's onscreen regardless of what's happening. She's distant and affected when speaking about the child she lost and the mother's life that was lost with the child. At no moment does she seem alive, until she's taken by the mutant bear.
• Acceptance is Josie. It's suggested in the film she's attempted suicide by slitting her wrists, but Cass believes it's more of an outlet for whatever pain she's going through. There's a gentle loneliness to Josie, and she's always able to accept the reality of the situation no matter how beautiful or terrible.

In an astounding moment of quiet beauty and palpable terror, Josie makes the choice to give herself over to The Shimmer. She reveals the cuts on her arms to Lena, and we see plants flowering from those cuts, growing at an alarmingly rapid rate. Josie says "Ventress wants to face it, you want to fight it. I don't think I want either of those things." Josie walks off to her fate, disappearing into and becoming part of the mutated flora. This moment in the film haunts me the more I think about it; it may be the most disturbing poetic death I've ever seen in a horror film. Tessa Thompson's portrayal of Josie's accepting her impending demise is just as beautiful as it is unsettling

Ultimately, Lena and Ventress, the remaining characters furthest from Acceptance, continue the journey to the lighthouse. Once there, they reach the same point Josie reached as her transformation reached full-flower (pun intended). They come to the end of themselves - the point at which The Shimmer forces them to make a choice.

Annihilation as Transcendence

According to Merriam-Webster, annihilation can mean one of two things:

1. the state or fact of being completely destroyed or obliterated : the act of annihilating something or the state of being annihilated.
2. the combination of a particle and its antiparticle (such as an electron and a positron) that results in the subsequent total conversion of the particles into energy.

In this case, and following what was discussed previously, we can see where Ventress stood on the meaning - she could only see the end of herself as she knew it, and thus carried that meaning forth as a value statement for the alien phenomenon as it regards everything on Earth. It's a variation of "form following function" substituting as understanding.

At this point however, I'd like to assert that what happens to Ventress is in fact closer to the second meaning. Which means that at some point before we see her conversion into a mass of fiery energy, she in fact came into contact with her other self (her doppelganger). The doppelganger represents the "anti" for each of these people which is necessary for annihilation to occur.

What's also fascinating is that in all three instances in this film of annihilation (the specific act of meeting their doppelganger) results in a fiery explosion of energy. The three instances are as follows:

• Kane encountering his doppelganger and self-immolating with a phosphorous grenade.
• Ventress (or her doppelganger) being converted into pure energy.
• Lena's doppelganger being immolated with a phosphorous grenade.

Consider also that each of these encounters is also representative of each character coming to the end of themselves. At the end of all knowledge and experience, one still has to face one's own self. Going another step further, the film symbolically argues that they only path to transcendence might be through annihilation - the reckoning with one's self.

Kane reaches the end of himself and cannot transcend his self-image as a failed man (as a soldier, husband, and as himself). In his self-loathing over the failure of his marriage and as a soldier, I think he comes to the conclusion that his doppelganger is better suited to survive. Further, the doppelganger is him in some form, thanks to the genetic refraction caused by The Shimmer. Kane self-immolates and transcends his human flaws in death.

Ventress sees annihilation as the end of the known self. We don't see (and therefore don't know) if it's her or her doppelganger which is annihilated, but the result is her conversion into energy, immediately then broken down to the cellular level and reconstituted as something new. Her transcendence is strictly the knowledge she attains before and as she is annihilated.

Lena's transcendence occurs when she gives her doppelganger the phosphorous grenade and immolates it. By destroying her doppelganger, she emerges from the lighthouse having fought her other self and overcome it - in an astounding sequence where her doppelganger (played by Sonoya Mizuno) mirrors her every action, and is staged like performance art/modern dance - this act also represents the end of The Shimmer, which is representative of her ability to re-enter the world, changed, but still herself.

Going further, if you subscribe to the view that the entire film is Lena's delusion caused by guilt - annihilating herself and ending The Shimmer is her mind's way of having overcome herself and the way her shame and guilt affected the world around her. It would follow that doppelganger Kane's illness would heal and they would be reunited. Doppelganger Kane represents the new husband affected by her infidelity, and in a coma as long as The Shimmer exists. It therefore follows they both have The Shimmer in their eyes, the reminder of her infidelity and how it has forever changed them.

Interestingly, this isn't the first time Garland has broached this idea visually. Sunshine (directed by Danny Boyle) features multiple characters who come to regard the Sun as a symbol of divine power and willingly expose themselves (in incrementally larger doses) to the Sun. The end desire (or result) for these characters is annihilation, in the act of seeking transcendence.

Both films suggest, whether traveling across the cosmos (Sunshine), or traveling to the end of themselves (Annihilation) that humans seek transcendence through annihilation rather than through change. Perishing as the known is preferable to evolving as the new.

Additional Thoughts

I've spent a lot of time discussing Annihilation's ideas.

One thing I haven't discussed much is how it made me feel.

I honestly can't remember another movie that ever captured a sense of poignant existential dread. There's a river of grief and sadness running under the surface of this film, and it's juxtaposed with images of ethereal beauty and startling horror, sometimes simultaneously. I can't say I've ever seen anything like it. When I saw it the second time, I went with the intent on trying to figure things out and I ended up giving myself over to the film and rolling with the emotional flow.

On a meta level, Annihilation certainly references many other genre works. Specifically among them (that I've seen) are Sunshine, The Thing, Alien, Forbidden Planet, Event Horizon, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Accordingly, part of the judgement of Annihilation rests in how well it represents (or refracts, if you will) genre. I think it's a resounding success.

First, the world it creates is completely convincing,  and even if the events in the movie are not possible according to our understanding of genetics, the conversations between the characters are based on real genetic science and not mashed-together technical gobbledygook. Science Fiction is always best not when operating in fantasy, but rather when the events are based in real science and stretched outward from real science - it adds plausibility and verisimilitude.

Annihilation is also a horror film and it has to deliver on those genre expectations. Two or three sequences are among the most unsettling and terrifying things I've seen in movies: the video of the soldier Kane disembowels to show the soldier's mutating moving innards, the mutant bear which emits the screaming voice of Cass when it cries out, and Kane's self-immolation with the phosphorous grenade.

The production design by Mark Digby is superb in evoking a bizarre lost and malevolent Eden. In terms of visualizing refraction, there's the town which feels like the jungle reclaimed a nuclear test site with flowering plants  - actually mutated flora with human hox (structural) DNA - standing like test dummies frozen in time. There's also the house in the town whose inside mirrors Lena and Kane's home almost precisely. 

I think Garland does a good job giving his audience tools to figure things out for themselves, without pandering or condescending. The discussion at the outset of the film about cancer cells may or may not explicitly highlight a major theme, but it certainly does apply a framework which allows viewers access to the picture's themes and ideas. As mentioned earlier, Garland repeatedly uses diffusion or refraction to clue the audience into what's happening within The Shimmer, all presented clearly and beautifully by Director of Photography Rob Hardy.

For crying out loud, I haven't even mentioned the score by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, which is wonderful for reasons I can't quite explain, other than it has lovely notes mixed with jarring, dissonant sounds which evoke a beautiful journey into hell.

If Annihilation has any flaws, I'd consider the possibility that the framing device spoils some of the suspense by making it clear from the beginning that all the women in the team either vanish or are killed. That said, the framing device does an effective job of giving the audience some breaks in tension, take in what they've just seen and factor it into their evaluation of the film. Further, it signals to the audience this film is not built around linear narrative set-ups and payoffs.

I'd also consider the film could use a touch more humor and warmth, particularly in the scenes between Lena and Kane. Again as a counterpoint, more humor would likewise spoil the tension and dread this film generates.

Frankly, those are minor (at worst) quibbles in a film that does so many things so well that for me to focus on them is to literally not see the forest for the trees.

A Note About Whitewashing

Here's the biggest issue surrounding the film...

Casting Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh in roles which were written as "of Asian heritage" and "partially Native-American" is another instance of Hollywood's tendency toward whitewashing.

Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson are terrific in this film (and for what its worth, I think these characters are treated as more than tokens), and the entire cast is as good a statement as there's been about women carrying a major film. It should also be pointed out that Lena's interrogator is played by Benedict Wong, a long-time genre character actor who has had significant moments in Sunshine, Prometheus, and The Martian (among many other films).

That said, this casting issue undercuts a film which has otherwise been credited for its primarily female cast. There's also a possibility the film could've been more resonant (and potentially appealed to a broader audience) had it been cast according to the books - which I have not read at the time of this writing. Garland has said the film was cast before the 2nd book was released - the 2nd book is when the ethnicity of the characters is established.

It's easy for me to say it doesn't make a difference in the film. I'm also a cisgender middle-aged white male whose point-of-view has always been well represented in mainstream media. I'm in no way qualified to speak on whether anyone should (or should not) see this film based on this issue. Maybe it's an honest mistake but the end result is the same, regardless of intent.

In Closing

I think Annihilation is a masterpiece (or very near one).

Its expected box office failure is even more heartbreaking for me because I want more movies that take risks like this one does, even if/when they are flawed and don't work. Annihilation provides an emotional, symbolic and metaphorical experience. Viewers looking for traditional narratives and definitive resolutions may find themselves confused and frustrated, and I'm well aware many viewers will utterly hate it.

But if you're willing to give Annihilation a chance, you just might fall in love with it.

For me, no film I've seen captures how it feels when you feel compelled to hurt yourself, when you feel dread at what lies before you for your compulsions, the sorrow of opportunities lost, regret for the pain you've caused others, and yet the feeling you can't change course or correct yourself.

Few films are as consistently able as this one to astonish you with its beauty, provoke you with its ideas, and chill you with terror as well or as often as this film does all three.

Lastly, and if possible, this should be experienced on a big screen where you can be fully immersed.

Author's Note: All screenshots from the Annihilation page on IMDB.com. This blog is used for educational/discussion purposes and the author receives no money from this blog.