Film review: Annihilation

Hello readers! Last week I watched Annihilation (2018), a science fiction film that received widespread critical acclaim. As with my previous review of Arrival, I will respect the integrity of this film by splitting my review into two parts: the first will contain only minor spoilers, aimed towards people who haven’t seen the film but might want to, while the second will be a detailed discussion of its themes and plot. Reader discretion advised.

PART ONE: MINOR SPOILERS

Annihilation prompted a monsoon of positive reviews when it premiered in 2018. It was touted as a proper, serious science fiction film aimed at adults, meaning that it could dare to be thought-provoking, gruesome and terrifying. The film leans much more heavily into the horror genre than science fiction; in fact, despite many of the characters identifying as scientists, the actual ‘science’ is rather lacking – and this is a deliberate decision, as most of the tension stems from fear of the unknown and the incomprehensible.

A quick introduction

The premise for this film is that a mysterious alien entity has crashed on Earth, generating a zone of eerie Lovecraftian weirdness from which nobody has ever returned. This zone is known as ‘The Shimmer’ due to the rippling, iridescent wall that separates it from the rest of the world, as it inflates like a giant, carnivorous soap bubble.

Our protagonist is Lena (Natalie Portman), a molecular biologist who used to be a soldier. Her husband (Oscar Isaac) is still a soldier; one who has been missing for over a year. At the start of the film, he suddenly returns home – but he doesn’t seem to know where he has been or how he got back. After events take a sudden turn for the worse, he and Lena end up in a government facility, where we learn that he was sent on a mission into The Shimmer, and is the only person ever to have returned from inside it.

This is where the roadmap of the plot falls into place. A new team is being assembled to enter The Shimmer and learn more about it, and with her competitive biologist CV and infallible protagonist credentials, Lena is quickly roped in. The route from here is obvious. We have a team of five scientists. They are going to enter The Shimmer, and things are going to get weird and scary.

My spoiler free verdict

Annihilation is certainly worth watching, although it isn’t a comfortable viewing experience by any means. The film is deeply unsettling – not gratuitously violent or full of jump-scares, but tense and eerie. However, the main reason to watch Annihilation is for the visuals. Without spoiling too much, I don’t think I have ever been quite so perturbed by a bunch of flowers. The artistic direction of this film is unique and impactful, with set pieces that would be at home in the Tate Modern, or in a mindfulness colouring book for adults. There is also a certain scene with a four-legged friend that will probably stick with you for a while.

However, besides the visuals and that certain scene, nothing else stands out to me. In fact, the more I ponder this film, the more I realise that the story, characters and dialogue leave a lot to be desired – and the acting sometimes suffers as a result of this, too. Still, the scenery is so strange and spectacular that most of these shortcomings can be overlooked, and if all you require is horror vibes and pretty trees, this film will more than exceed your expectations.

If you haven’t seen this film and would like to, this is where you should stop reading. The next part of this post contains major spoilers and stronger opinions, so if you want to view through innocent, unbiased eyes, go no further. You have been warned.

PART TWO: MAJOR SPOILERS

Here come the stronger opinions! I’ll preface this section with the fact that I did enjoy this film, and that it does some things very well. However, the more I thought about it afterwards, the more the enchantment wore off. I might even, tentatively, go as far as to say that this film has been overrated. Yes, it dared to be weird, and to have a cast of women, and to have a screaming mutant bear, but the plot raised a lot of questions – and not in a good way.

Shimmery scenery

Let’s kick off this discussion by recognising what Annihilation did well. There are plenty of reasons to like this film, but the scenery is the one thing that has stuck in my mind over the past week (besides the screaming bear). Swamps and abandoned villages are stalwarts of the horror genre; swamps, in particular, are great at hiding threats and creating a constant sense of dread. You never know when a mutant alligator might jump out at you. Florida man might be lurking around any one of those trees. And if this spooky setting feels a little bit unsubtle, the weirdness of the mutant Florida flora more than makes up for it.

I love the floral and fungal arrangements in this film. The colour palette is gorgeous, and whatever freelancing Florida florist they found really did a number on those mutant magnolias. It is impossible to forget that you are inside The Shimmer, when every shot has an otherworldly glow, and when each plant is a pastel rainbow explosion. The abundance of colour on leaves and lichens is both beautiful and creepy, managing to be both natural and very unnatural. This is probably the film’s greatest strength – taking something familiar and twisting it. We are presented with an ecological uncanny valley, where mutations look harmless but scare us all the same. It’s great.

Mutation bear and shiny alien

Once we see the animals and plants mutating, it is obvious where the film is heading. We all know that there will be bigger, scarier monsters deeper into The Shimmer, and it doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to expect that the protagonists will start mutating too. This anticipation culminates, of course, in the scene with the screeching mutated bear, which is probably the highlight of the film. It’s truly horrible.

The end of the film is also visually striking, even after mutation bear has stolen the show. The imagery in and around the lighthouse is incredible, especially the crystal trees. The spooky hole leading down to the impact crater is wonderfully disconcerting, as is the creepy interior with its shifting walls – and of course, the cherry on the cake is the pulsating technicolour alien blob creature which speaks through the medium of BBC radiophonic workshop noises. When this blob decides to mimic Natalie Portman, it loses some of its charm, but is still sufficiently spooky. I should also mention the music at this point, which is consistently disconcerting and suits the tone perfectly. However…

It’s weirdly basic.

I have read a lot of reviews for this film calling it ‘thought-provoking’ and ‘deep’, but after a week of careful contemplation, I’m afraid I disagree. Yes, it is paradoxical that I spent a week pondering whether a film was thought-provoking – but hear me out.

Annihilation doesn’t ask any big questions. This sets it apart from most science fiction, where narratives often use alien settings and advanced technology to explore moral quandaries, and to dig down into what it means to be human. Annihilation doesn’t question any part of our human nature – not even while we have five protagonists trapped in a mind-bending warzone, and not even once it introduces an alien lifeform. The film tries to impress us with its ‘maturity’ by making passing references to self-harm, cancer, and losing children, without ever exploring their significance. Maybe it never intended to get ‘deep’, but this ends up feeling like a missed opportunity.

Another critical aspect missing from this science fiction film was the science. Despite the protagonist being a molecular biologist, we learn surprisingly little about The Shimmer and what it does to animals. For example, we see very few mutated creatures in the swamp, and if this is because most mutations kill their host, then why not show the dead animals – the failed mutations? Give us some idea of how many die and how many survive. Show us how mutations have benefitted some organisms, but damaged others. Show us how mutations might interact, forming new symbiotic relationships that wreak havoc on the environment. Again, this feels like a missed opportunity. The film could have delved so much deeper into the operation of ecosystems, and it wouldn’t have needed a long-winded explanation – just some additional glimpses into the workings of the swamp.

In a similar vein, I can’t help but feel that the animal mutations were underused. The first attack is by an alligator, a creature which is already very threatening in its un-mutated form. The mutant version doesn’t utilise its adaptations to create an innovative attack (unlike our delightful bear friend), and so it just acts like a normal alligator. There is no build-up to its ambush. We don’t see smaller creatures with minor mutations first, to give us an idea that the Florida fauna might be more frisky than usual, and we don’t see any carcasses of animals that have succumbed to mutations, or been savaged by their mutated brethren. Instead, we just go straight for the alligator, which feels a little uninspired, given the surreal setting.

The science isn’t even the shallowest part of this film. A simple a-to-b plot is forgivable in a genre where ideas and settings take centre stage, but in a film like this it feels flawed. Our characters are heading for the lighthouse in the centre of The Shimmer, where the alien entity is known to have crashed. However, just why they are doing this is never emphasised. I wasn’t sure whether it was a simple research trip, a rescue mission to find the missing people, whether they intended to put an end to the spread, or all of the above somehow. Most of the time, they seemed to be playing things by ear and not communicating to one another, and this made it very difficult to understand character motivations (more on this later). The whole mission ends up ringing hollow. We don’t know what branch of the government or military is involved, and it seems bizarre that this region has been growing for three years and nobody has tried nuking it yet.

The lack of depth we see in the science and politics undermines the ‘mature’ tone that this film was going for. There is never any mention of what The Shimmer might do if it keeps spreading, how it might change our environment for the better, or for the worse, and so we are never confronted with the obvious peril that would be a logical driver for our protagonists to want to understand it. Also, how have none of the mutated creatures made it beyond the confines of the shimmery walls? Half of The Shimmer extends over the sea, and we’re meant to believe that shiny mutant sharks haven’t made it out? Unlikely.

My final gripe over the shallowness of this film is the framed narrative. There is no reason for it (although I’m sure Benedict Wong appreciated his paycheque). From the start, we know that the supporting cast will be killed off progressively, because it’s just that sort of film. It was obvious that they were going to die in increasingly weird or gruesome ways – and although Annihilation certainly doesn’t disappoint on that front, we didn’t need this to be disclosed by Lena within the first five minutes. The framed narrative adds nothing but clunky exposition, which subsequently exposes the shallowness of the film.

Characters?

Another main complaint from me is that the characters didn’t serve any purpose in the story besides acting as food for our hungry bear friend. The fact that they were women didn’t add anything to the plot – which could be interpreted as a sign of equality, because they would have been just as vacuous had they been played by men. It really wouldn’t have made a difference. None of the characters felt remotely fleshed out – not even the ones growing additional flesh as they mutated. We are subjected to a list of backstories, and these are all paper-thin, describing the characters only by various tragic life experiences (the one who lost a child, the one with cancer, and the one who self-harmed at some point). At no point do we see characters developing, or witness any relationships growing. This means that when their deaths finally roll around, they don’t hit as hard as they could.

Even the protagonist is a mystery to us. I wasn’t rooting for Lena’s success, so much as rooting for her to keep moving so that we could see more screaming bears and pretty flowers. In fact, I didn’t even know what Lena would consider to be a successful mission. All she could tell us through the stilted, retrospective exposition was that she thought she was the only member of the group who wanted to go in and come back. Why did she think that? Who knows. We never saw her talking to the other characters about it. As for why she wants to enter The Shimmer, we are left in the dark. She mentions wanting to save her husband, but we weren’t given any reason to suspect that The Shimmer holds the clues to saving him. If she is only risking her life for research purposes, this isn’t emphasised either.

Throughout the film, we learn very little about Lena’s character. We find out that she had an affair while her husband was missing, but this serves little purpose. Are we to infer that she has fallen out of love with him? That she doesn’t care too much if he dies? If so, it doesn’t make sense that she is risking her life in The Shimmer to save him. Perhaps the affair is only intended to show us that Lena is fallible and flawed, but this seems irrelevant, because it wasn’t as if the film gave us any reason to think she was an angel. Two hours in, and we don’t know anything about her at all. The more I think about it, the more bemused I get.

I have questions.

Annihilation provides an intriguing concept, but makes no attempt to explore it in depth. My rant so far has brought up many questions, but I have a few more to throw in before I sum up.

Firstly, the ‘physicist’ character says that The Shimmer is ‘refracting’ DNA in the same way that it refracts radio signals. Now, I see the elegance of this. The iridescence and rainbows are visually stunning, and the refraction of radio signals is a great excuse to cut off our characters from the outside world. However, our characters never seem to question this ‘refraction’ any further. They are meant to be scientists, and yet they never question anything in sufficient depth. Can the mutations be stopped? Can they be beneficial? Can we all have a screaming bear as a pet now?

At the end, Lena tricks the shiny alien into pulling a pin on a phosphorous grenade, thereby setting itself on fire. Then, for some reason, everything else that has mutated also catches fire – even the crystal trees. My obvious question is – how? Crystals don’t normally catch fire. Are we meant to believe that everything mutated is connected somehow? This was never implied. If so, then this includes Lena, who saw mutations in her own blood earlier in the film. Furthermore, if the alien is so flammable, it’s a miracle that it survived the first grenade that went off in its vicinity. Most annoyingly of all, we don’t find out if The Shimmer vanishes, because we cut back to Lena in the framed narrative interrogation room. Perhaps the world is safe from the shimmer now – but do any of the characters care about this? Do we?

Finally, at the end of the film, we find out that Lena’s husband is an alien copy of the original (or something on those vague lines), and the final twist is that Lena’s eyes are now shiny. Unfortunately, this isn’t much of a twist, because so much is left unexplained. If we had been led to believe that the threat had been annihilated (roll credits), maybe this would have been more of a shock, but we already knew about her husband being a clone – and the film never showed The Shimmer vanishing. Are we meant to believe that Lena is a cloned version, or that she is just a mutant? Who knows.

In summary…

That review ended up more brutal than I thought it would. Even as I was writing, new flaws made themselves apparent. I still think that this film is worth watching if you haven’t seen it, just for the visuals (and for the bear), but from a story perspective, it’s disappointing. Hopefully I can review something funnier next time, without feeling as if I have crushed somebody’s dreams. Happy reading, and have a great week!