Even though Annihilation can be streamed on Netflix on March 12, 2018, I decided to be team girl power and see it in the theaters. Annihilation is an adaptation of the first of a trilogy of books about an all woman scientist team going into a quarantined zone called The Shimmer that no one has escaped after they entered. It is obvious that the filmmakers devoted a lot of thought and worked really hard to bring these concepts to life, but if you must see it, please wait until it is available to be streamed.
Unfortunately I saw Annihilation soon after Jane Got A Gun, and the similarities are striking: lots of flashbacks, husband in jeopardy and Natalie Portman wielding a gun. Portman needs to stop getting married in movies. Her husbands always get messed up (Jackie, Jane Got a Gun, Star Wars prequels, Brothers, etc.). I didn’t realize how aggrieved I would feel that the main character needed a relationship excuse, not pure scientific curiosity or professional responsibilities, to enter The Shimmer. Can’t chicks just want to do something epic. Do they have to do it to save their husbands or kids. On the other hand, it is usually the guy saving the chick. It still stuck in my craw enough to be problematic. There was one moment when I was surprised, which I actually suspected in the opening, but dismissed until a later flashback
Also I hate to be that person, but I did not think that her character, Lena, was that interesting. I wished that Annihilation followed Josie, Tessa Thompson’s soft-spoken, physicist character, who was way more intriguing. She is soft spoken, but figures things out pretty quickly, and her fate is left a mystery. Her character’s choice to not take similar actions as the rest of the team suggests a provocative alternative to the usual sci-fi trope, and I wish that the film explored her motivations more since she was on an individual journey, and perhaps finally felt alive, not afraid. “Ventress wants to face it. You want to fight it. But I don’t want either of those things.” I don’t know what that looks like, but apparently the filmmaker does not either. If women are going to be the focus of sci-fi films, it would be a nice contrast to really explore how that can open up the narrative instead of just the knee jerk reaction of making it solely about relationships.
Dr. Ventress, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, is way more interesting than a supporting character’s terse explanation of her problem. With very little screen time, Leigh creates a profile of her character tired of consigning people to oblivion and eager to get the privilege to face it herself. While Lena and Dr. Ventress’ psychological profiles are traditionally masculine storylines, Leigh evoked a sense of mystery that mirrored the sustained mood of the film.
Annihilation’s narrative structure starts at the end, the how we got here trope, which I despise, and uses the interrogation/debriefing device. When the film ends, and Benedict Wong exclaims the one word answer to the phenomenon, which seems obvious at the beginning, I wanted to scream, “Duh!” We basically know what is going to happen when the team enters The Shimmer.
S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S
By the time that we get to the phallic/vagina dentata structure (hi, The Last Jedi hole, glad to see that you are getting more work), your early suspicions are completely confirmed: mime from hell, but without bad intentions. Once we see the home movie, it confirms that Lena is an unreliable narrator. Lena calls it mirroring, but considering the aliens’ lack of understanding of what is happening to them, it could be a form of echopraxia or imitative learning as children usually do with their parents up to two to three years old. They have all these quarantine protocols in place, but they are not monitoring what Lena and her husband say to each other? Did they look at the video or did Lena destroy them before emerging from The Shimmer? (Side note: yippee to the found footage element of Annihilation.) I want better, people. Seeing too many movies ruins little surprises like these supposed plot twists, and like Jane Got A Gun, the couple can finally get their happy ending. What does that mean for the rest of us? If Oscar Isaac is in a movie directed by the same dude from Ex Machina, don’t trust him!
Annihilation was like a mash up of H. P. Lovecraft, but hesitated from going all the way there (and I don’t mean horror though I adore The Mist), What Dreams May Come, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Monsters. Even though I do not have a fraction of the filmmakers’ experience, skill or creativity, the visual execution was somewhat lacking and derivative for me as a viewer. Not everyone can be H.R. Giger, but some of the Technicolor explosion of fauna and flora felt silly instead of strange. The filmmakers’ imagination had its limits. The rhyme and reason behind the tattoos lacked a pattern.
There is also the elusive concept of lost time and memory problems that is eluded to in the beginning then largely exchanged for dementia. The most shocking moments were the psychological transformation of Anya, the friendly, lesbian paramedic and the mutant bear that mimicked human voices to lure prey, which was a page straight out of a supernatural horror flick, but felt fresh in a sci-fi alien context. The idea of apocalypse by unintentional terraforming and making something new was mind-blowing then we end up with doppelganger Portman and Isaac, which is not only NOT otherworldly, but anticlimactic and trite. Doppelgangers always get rid of the originals. It seemed like Josie accepted transformation and what would the world look like if it accepted inevitable annihilation as another moment of creation, Eden, “a religious event, an extraterrestrial event, a higher dimension.” The real horror of this film is losing oneself, but ultimately this film punks out and makes it about finding your significant other regardless of circumstances—just no. Somewhere Ridley Scott is screaming at the screen for not getting his Space Jesus right, but sorry, Annihilation is still better than Prometheus. Maybe Denis Villeneuve could have nailed it.
Annihilation is a movie full of surreal, maddening or resurrecting potential, but it missed the mark. I’m slightly intrigued enough to consider reading the book, but the movie left me feeling dissatisfied enough to not want to commit to a trilogy. I don’t need a woman main character to be approachable, i.e. primarily care about her relationship, to be invested in her storyline. The fate of mankind will do.