Annihilation

Whilst not a horror film exactly, Annihilation is a tense, edge-of-the-seat sci-fi thriller that combines atmospheric direction, a great cast, and an intriguing concept, to create one of the most gripping and intelligent sci-fi films of recent years.

Premise:  While mourning her Special Forces husband who is presumed killed in action, Lena (Natalie Portman), a former soldier now working as a cellular biology professor, is offered the chance to investigate “the Shimmer”, a visible electromagnetic field over an area of swampland that has been secretly quarantined by the military following a meteor strike.

Review:

I’ve tried to say as little as possible about the plot in this review, as Annihilation is one of those films that is more engaging the less you know about it going in.  What I will say is that although this is a very thoughtful – and arguably thought-provoking – intelligent sci-fi thriller, it’s not in any way a dry or overly-talky film either.  In fact, it’s right on the cusp of being a sci-fi/horror film, as much of the film is suffused with a palpable sense of dread, and there are several scenes that are nail-bitingly tense.  But there isn’t a central “monster” (unlike in last year’s Life), nor is there a straightforward “haunted house” approach (unlike there arguably was in last month’s The Cloverfield Paradox), and instead Annihilation’s threat is something more unsettling and insidious.

The key to Annihilation’s success is arguably the writer/director Alex Garland.  Although Alex Garland has written several successful screenplays over the last two decades (including 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Dredd), it was his 2015 directorial debut Ex_Machina that really put him on the map, earning him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, as well as the DGA Award for best first time director.  Ex_Machina was an outstanding film (if you’ve not seen it, I highly recommend it), and one of the most original and intelligent sci-fi thrillers of the last ten years.

“…feels like a spiritual successor to his earlier film ‘Ex_Machina’…”

For his directorial follow up, Alex Garland has adapted Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, although as I understand it (not having read the novel), it is only a very loose adaptation because Alex Garland wanted to take the novel’s premise in a different direction.  Certainly, Garland’s Annihilation feels like a spiritual successor to his earlier Ex_Machina, as both deal with lofty concepts about the nature of humanity and what it means to be human, but in an accessible and dramatically satisfying way.  Both are also arguably examinations of the more negative aspects of human nature – Ex_Machina played very effectively with the moral issues arising from the creation of artificial intelligence, while Annihilation touches on mankind’s apparently inherent self-destructive tendencies.

But Alex Garland’s strength is that he never lets these high concepts get in the way of telling a gripping story.  Once the main characters in Annihilation enter “the Shimmer”, the film takes on a dreamlike quality, where neither the characters nor the viewers can entirely trust their senses.  Time seems to warp, as does nature itself – and you realise this isn’t a dream, it’s a nightmare.

“…a tense, nightmarish sci-fi thriller that doesn’t spoon-feed you all the answers…”

The cast is great, and interestingly, almost entirely female, although the film never makes a big deal of that fact. Natalie Portman leads the film as Lena, with an interestingly layered performance that means her character is never as straightforward as she might have first appeared.  Jennifer Jason Leigh plays the project leader, who walks the fine line between seeming trustworthy and not, with Golden Globe winner Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thomson (playing a character a million miles away from Valkyrie in Thor: Ragnarok) and Swedish actress Tuva Novotny making up the rest of the expedition.  Oscar Isaac, who starred in Ex_Machina for Alex Garland, cameos in flashbacks as Lena’s missing husband.

The elephant in the room as far as this film is concerned, is the “real life” issues surrounding its release.  Annihilation was conceived and filmed by Alex Garland as a cinematic release, but due to recent critically acclaimed intelligent sci-fi films underperforming at the box office (such as the excellent Blade Runner 2049), Paramount got cold feet.  The rumours are that Paramount executives demanded that changes be made to the film to make it more commercial (i.e. dumb it down) if it was to be cinematically released.  Alex Garland and his producer Scott Rudin apparently refused to alter the finished film just to appease Paramount, and so Paramount decided to only release the film cinematically in the US, and sold the international rights to Netflix.

“…a complex & thought-provoking film which doesn’t sacrifice its entertainment value…”

Alex Garland was vocally disappointed that a film he made for the cinema was not being released (internationally, at least) in the cinema, and having seen Annihilation on the small screen, I can only imagine how impressive some of the visuals would have looked on the big screen.  But Alex Garland was also fairly circumspect about the commercial reality of the situation, and in a marketplace where it’s increasing difficult to get funding for intelligent sci-fi films like this, I’d rather one gets made and shown on the small screen than not made at all.

Alex Garland has a knack for making complex and thought-provoking films which don’t sacrifice their entertainment value in order to examine challenging themes, and that’s a rare talent.  On one level, you could just enjoy Annihilation as a tense, nightmarish thriller, but if you like thoughtful sci-fi that doesn’t spoon-feed you all the answers, then you should really enjoy what Annihilation has to offer.