Annihilation: Alex Garland

I remember this feeling of awe, of trembling. I felt it for the first time in high school reading Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. At the time, I had already read many of the great sci-fi novels. But they had all—even the pulpy ones about space adventurers and intergalactic conquest—operated under the pretense of mankind’s ability to understand, react to, and in some meager way control the cosmos and the laws of nature. But here was a book about the impossibility of knowing, the ineffable futility of mankind’s feeble attempts at comprehending the universe. And for the first time in my life I felt a kind of true and terrible terror towards the vast, unknowing void beyond our planet and the inconceivable wonders and horrors without.

And now, a decade later, I felt that same horror again, but this time from a movie. Alex Garland’s Annihilation, based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VenderMeer, trades not in what mankind can learn, but in what mankind cannot—and perhaps should not—learn. The film follows a five woman team of scientists as they investigate a phenomenon known as the Shimmer, a strange area where the laws of biology and time seem to work differently. After an unidentified object crashed near a lighthouse on the coast of North America, this zone has grown and expanded to swallow up the nearby countryside of swamp and marsh, several small towns, and even a military base. Dubbed “Area X” by the government, all attempts to enter, investigate, and contain the Shimmer have failed.

Enter Lena (Natalie Portman), cellular biologist from John Hopkins and former U.S. Army soldier. Her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) was the only surviving member of the previous expedition, and he lies on a hospital bed clinging to life as mysterious cancerous growths choke his vital organs. As Lena and her team dive deeper and deeper into the Shimmer, they discover an ecosystem gone mad where organisms evolve at such breakneck speeds that over a dozen different flowers can grow on a single stalk. Mutated animals wonder the countryside, some made angelic by their transformation, others modified into perfect killing machines. Crystal towers of bizarre geometric shapes jut out from sandy dunes. Crowds of people-shaped plants populate an evacuated neighborhood. The half-clothed skeleton of a dead soldier from a previous expedition lies plastered to the side of a drained pool, his limbs splashing out onto the walls as thick vines of leaves and moss. And everywhere there grows a strange cotton-candy colored fungi like some leprous infection. After discovering a chilling tape of Kane’s unit slicing open the stomach of one of their sick comrades to find his intestines changed into a writhing mass of snake-like tubes, they realize they’ve begun to change, too.

Members of the team get picked off, some by nightmarish animals, others by surrendering to their own madness. During these scenes one might mistake Annihilation for a horror or slasher movie. One extended sequence involving a mutated bear that can mimic human speech even echoes John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). But the fear is a byproduct of this story of doomed exploration, not its intent. Garland has more on his mind than crafting a simple creature feature, no matter how much these creations beg for screen time.

Many critics have mentioned that Annihilation borrows too liberally from other esoteric sci-fi films about scientists investigating a mysterious unknown like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), and even the three adaptations of my beloved Solaris. But I hesitate to call it a mere imitation. It may borrow the measured pacing, introspection, and tone from these films, but to call it a rip-off would be like dismissing any action movie for having gratuitous violence, fast-pacing, and rapid-fire editing as derivative of films like Die Hard (1988) or Hard Boiled (1992). It uses similar techniques, but it’s a film that carves out its own mesmerizing place in the sci-fi canon. I have scarcely been this hypnotized by a third act of a sci-fi film. Even Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), the closest any other recent sci-fi film has come to evoking this sort of awed wonder, revealed its secrets in its closing minutes. But Annihilation leaves us just as confused, lost, and curious at the end as we are at the beginning. And I’d scarcely want it any other way.

Rating: 9/10