Annihilation Review
Annihilation is dense. There are layers to Alex Garland’s film, and each one is excellently crafted.
In the beginning, the film is one that follows many traditions of the science fiction movies of the 1980’s, in plot and in a lot of the visual style. We follow Natalie Portman’s character Lena, who, after a personal tragedy, joins a group of scientists on a journey into an area called the Shimmer, where the laws of nature are...altered. This is where the movie starts to change, and my guess is you’ve never seen anything quite like what it becomes. (Keeping this in mind, I’d like to go ahead and undermine my own writing by suggesting that if you have not seen this film yet, you should watch it before reading the rest of this, as I think an individual discovery of the film is ideal.)
Between flashbacks of Lena’s past and the increasingly horrific and beautiful journey into the heart of the Shimmer in the present, Garland’s bigger concepts begin to become apparent. We slowly learn about the problem in Lena’s marriage, and about the processes that are occurring in the Shimmer. There’s a juxtaposition between the intimacy of Lena’s history and the operatic grandeur and savagery of her present situation, that works to make the narrative feel much more personal and emotionally resonant. Big things feel small in this story, and vice versa. Through this tone, the discovery of what is actually happening in the Shimmer becomes much more powerful: that the matter of nature in this area is not just being destroyed, but refracted, rearranged, and remixed into what first appears like utter chaos, but is revealed as something more. We see deer with flowers growing from their antlers, a giant crocodile with the teeth of a shark, and we slowly start to understand the effect this place has on humans. Each of the four scientists at the center of this story has personal pain, and something that is physically or emotionally destroying them from the inside out. When our characters finally do reach their destination, culminating in what very well may be one of the most fascinating sequences in cinema of the past decade or so. One of the messages of the director (whose former career was that of a screenwriter, destroying his own work and changing it to fit others’ standards, thus adding another layer to the allegory) becomes clear.
The film is about the self-destruction coded in our DNA, the imperfection of life, human, and otherwise, and how we deal with the mistakes we make. Our personalities and bodies, like the matter that makes up our world, are never really destroyed: They are simply transformed into something different. Sometimes that change is painless, but more often than not it will hurt. And that’s what Annihilation really means in this context, change.
