Annihilation Review: Mutating Reputation

Annihilation favors thematic intrigue and sci-fi horror over a consistent script or visuals.

An asteroid crashes to earth, and “The Shimmer,” a wall of plasma like energy, begins its expansion. It’s captured in silence, creating an effectively unnerving tone accompanying the mysterious threat presented to audience’s. In this way, the story moves quickly, itself like a mutation emerging and progressing at unprecedented rates. It’s exciting to open a film with the audience as lost as its main character; Natalie Portman as Lena, an ex-soldier and current biology teacher at John Hopkins, is in the middle of an interrogation. Her words are sparse, quite literally giving nothing to the hazmat suit in front of her. Who is the alien here? One could be forgiven for saying “all of the above.” Portman delivers a convincingly unsettled, inhuman performance. One is unnerved just from looking at the actress caving into herself under the weight of her own existentially induced uncertainty. Again, Annihilation opens convincingly by demonstrating its greatest and most consistent strength: developing an unsettling atmosphere that supports its more heady thematic concepts. Because, for better or worse, Annihilation is far more concerned with its questions about life, change, and self-destruction than nearly any other component of the filmmaking process, making for a film that is undoubtedly one of the most thought provoking and terrifying of the 2010s, but just as unintentionally confusing and visually primitive.

In the same opening sequence, information is flung at the audience with the subtlety of, well, a gigantic plasma sphere emerging from a lighthouse. Did I mention the government has managed to keep that a secret for years? Two issues immediately make themselves apparent in the film’s script: missing subtlety and an inconsistent logic. Lena is teaching a class on cancer cells and mutations, a trick out of Breaking Bad’s book of writing; Lena is giving a lesson to the class on the core themes of the film. This would be clever…if it hasn’t already been performed and hackneyed by some of the greatest feats of writing put to screen. Similarly subtle, Lena leaves the classroom and is stopped by a coworker. We get the feeling Dan and Lena have unsettled business, which is confirmed by the out of place interrogation Dan performs in the middle of the University building’s sterile lounge. “It’s time to move on,” says Dan, or something along those lines. The dialogue is generic enough to be easily replaceable and stand out like the aforementioned, impossible to miss, magical half sphere growing from the coast. And yet, it’s a secret. Just as one is supposed to simply believe many of the film’s assumptions because a character bluntly states it, one is always expected to accept the flowery language and dull declarations made by the cardboard cutouts of archetypes.

Despite the stutter from missing subtext, the film’s quick pace continues as Kane, Lena’s ex-love who was thought to be dead and has been lingering in her mind for years (as so “effortlessly” communicated to the audience by know-it-all Dan) suddenly returns. To the hospital, then to the secret government facility that sent Kane on his fatal mission in the first place. Cut back in time to Lena and Kane, cut back to the present, then back to the past, and one more time to the present to introduce the stock characters that become our leading crew as we enter “The Shimmer.” I don’t mean to overlook too much of the story, but the roundabout editing and confusing decision to structure the film out of chronological order simultaneously delivers information in a way that can build tension, but more often than not completely negates any attempts at it. Having already known the entire crew will perish in “The Shimmer” from minute one, I was hoping for more extreme demonstrations of “The Shimmer’s” threat, something more than just vague hints of danger as the crew investigates the world inside of the wall. However, when the set pieces deliver, they are terrifying. When the concept is pushed to its creative limits in effectively constructed sequences of cosmic horror, all previous complaints seemingly vanish. However, the majority of the film remains quietly contemplative, with characters observing a world I simply wanted to see more of for its ideas to be satisfyingly developed. The promise of the premise doesn’t feel fulfilled, whether that be from characters overtly revealing information that could have been kept hidden beneath interesting subtext, the narrative structure acting as the same tension assassin, or there simply not being very many instances of “The Shimmer’s” terrifying concept brought to its maximum potential.

But that doesn’t mean Annihilation is completely unsuccessful. The score is astounding, and perfectly elevates the film’s other worldly terror whenever incorporated. Specific creature designs completely deliver on the millions of interesting ideas that come from the film’s core concept, and specific sequences prove that there are strong filmmakers behind the camera. In fact, the film ends on a note so powerfully existential that it has seemed to overshadow many complaints with the film as time has gone on. I admit, the ending was definitely interesting, and a demonstration of everything that makes Annihilation as thought provoking as it is. From Portman’s nuanced performance giving life to a one-dimensional character to the aforementioned unsettling score, the final twenty minutes of this film are its most successful, revealing just how powerful of an idea the film is working with.

Sadly, ideation is where Annihilation starts and ends for this viewer. While the concepts discussed are dense, I found them to not be fully developed. Or, at the very least, difficult to connect to because of all of the film’s other faults. I found “The Shimmer” to be a genius analog for self-destruction, but the ways in which the film presents this concept is inconsistent. All of the female crew are “broken” according to the script. “She tried to kill herself?” “I’d say the opposite. She was trying to feel alive.” No need to get all flowery over attempted suicide, and all of the other instances of overly poetic writing applied to hard science act as further proof of how an interesting concept can be botched from poor communication, written or visual. Because to me, Annihilation also fails on creating an interesting visual language. Lens flares paired with heavy CGI gives the film a plastic-y sheen that proved detrimental to any attempt at aesthetic beauty. Which is an issue for a film that, in its most interesting move, attempts to subvert its thematic conceit in the final moments. What if this wall of death was actually evolving humans instead of killing them? What if what we perceive as horrifying is actually beautiful? These questions are nullified when everything is as desaturated and generic as any modern blockbuster. Wides and medium shots absolutely dominate, failing to visually communicate information or subtext for the majority of scenes, as if there were any hidden emotions to reveal via the camera at all. To me, Lena remained steadfastly static in her desire, and the remaining crew hardly evolved beyond stock characters that at times feel as though they’re from a completely different film. Jennifer Leigh as Dr. Ventress was sadly unbearable to watch; I felt as though someone had to prop up her heavy eyelids as she half-slept through the film with an overly pessimistic attitude communicated with uncharacteristic poeticism. Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson are wasted on archetypal roles that in the source text had meaning behind their simplicity, but on screen, simply has the two come off as uninteresting adaptations. And again, the editing proved to confuse more than intrigue, with some cuts feeling closer to continuity errors than deliberate choices.

All to come back to that final sequence. Twenty minutes of pure, uninterrupted cosmic horror operating at a high level. The ending proves itself lasting and effective; days later and I simply want to keep talking about Annihilation. The film has to be at least somewhat successful in that case, right? But would I not get a similar experience then from the novel? If an adaptation doesn’t take advantage of the new media form the story finds itself in, in my eyes, the art fails to justify its own existence. While saving itself in its final moments, Annihilation ultimately disappointed a viewer expecting a sci-fi marvel based on its growing reputation. In this regard, progress and expansion proved just as detrimental to the film as a cancerous cell, infinitely growing, infinitely dying. Annihilation matches the mutation's inconsistency.