Annihilation tense and terrifying

Natalie Portman in Annihilation. Image courtesy Paramount Pictures.

Annihilation comes ever so close to being a brilliant piece of science fiction. The movie is a fascinating existential thriller overloaded with tension and hopelessness to go along with its strange creatures and otherworldly locale. It has a lot to say about the mind, body, and soul, but it loses itself when it speaks as often as it does without allowing the wonder to creep in. Instead of inspiring thoughts and allowing the imagination to go wild, Annihilation tries to control the conversation, much to its detriment.

Words convey only so much for a science fiction movie; exploration in every sense of the word is of greater importance. To his credit, writer/director Alex Garland's, who adapted the eponymous novel, has the structure for the type of adventure needed for Annihilation to succeed. Garland keeps things simple with the story, trimming the novel to focus on five women assigned to explore a great unknown hiding behind a strange shimmering wall. Four of them (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, and Tuva Novotny) are assigned to investigate the source of the shimmer that is constantly consuming more and more land. The fifth, Lena (Natalie Portman), enters to find out what happened to her husband (Oscar Isaac) and to atone for her past misdeeds. It's just five women, walking through a new world where things are just close enough to normal to seem familiar, yet are still miles away from being normal. And it doesn't take long for things to start falling apart.

Annihilation reaches into the basic fears people have about themselves and their identities and brings those fears right in front of the viewers' eyes. The body horror is rendered more terrifying by the existential crisis surrounding Lena and her comrades. They become lost to something greater than they are, begin to lose the little things that make them human, which in turn makes them, and the audience by extension, even more confused and frightened. What they discover is the horror of the great unknown, the absence of certainty and the uncontrollable shifts in their being that breaks them down from the inside out. It makes for an intense movie, and Garland cranks the suspense up to around a 12 by the middle of the second act. Annihilation becomes really, really uncomfortable right around the time when the really bad things begin to happen to the protagonists, and it gets downright frightening in one really discomfiting scene in which nature attacks with shrieks and wails and teeth and nails. Twenty years ago that scene would have led to numerous nightmares on my end; now it'll be just a night or two of bad dreams.

That scene is followed by an explanation for the cause of the fear, and the definition is somewhat terrifying in its own right. But it is part of a larger struggle Garland has with Annihilation and balancing how much of an explanation he owes to the audience for the movie's oddities. In lieu of showing and implying, Garland has characters speak often in exposition for the audience's benefit, which results in emotional removal from the oddities taking place on screen. The problem extends to the narrative structure, which greatly reduces the urgency and ambiguity Annihilation strives to attain. It undercuts the film's best parts; the deterministic moments when the characters trudge forward with the same amount of uncertainty as the viewer

Garland ultimately shoots himself in the foot by keeping viewers at least a step or two outside of the world he built, although that might have been a little intentional. For a Sci-Fi movie about an uncontrolled mutation the visualization is a bit lackluster. Annihilation depicts an Earth slowly but surely morphing into something more alien but still slightly connected to the human world. Yet the film's environment doesn't feel overly alien because viewers are not indoctrinated into the bizarre terrestrial version of our planet. Annihilation is so consumed by its explanations it fails to bring viewers along with it into the great unknown. Only the characters are allowed to get lost in this world; the audience is stuck watching from a few miles away from the safety of their seats.

It's difficult not to wish for a little more out of something as outright weird and perturbing as Annihilation. With a better sense of wonder, this movie would be magnificent instead of just interestingly bizarre.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

 

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 115 minutes

Genre: Sci-Fi

Ask Away
Target audience: Sci-Fi fans and people who were really into Ex Machina.

Take the whole family?: This is way too eerie and bloody for kids.

Theater or Netflix?: Theater isn't vital, but it's definitely worth a matinee trip.

How scary is this movie?: It isn't quite traditional horror, but the overarching vibe is terrifying. The scene referenced in the review is bothersome on many levels, as are the fates of a few of the characters. People who are bothered by jump scares and more traditional frights will be fine; it's the folks who overthink movie universes who will receive a spate of bad dreams.

Watch this as well?: Annihilation shares a few similarities with Apocalypse Now, with both targeting the thin line between sanity and mayhem. There are also a few similarities with John Carpenter's The Thing, which is always great to watch.