Movie Reaction: Annihilation

Formula: (Contact + Under the Skin) / Arrival

2015's Ex Machina had me from frame one. Despite the moral quandaries of it, the movie was very easy to grasp. It's one of my favorite story structures: put a few characters in a room, watch how they bounce off one another, and see who leaves it (Free Fire is another great example of this). The cast was made up of that guy I loved from About Time, that guy I loved from Inside Llewyn Davis, and that impossibly beautiful Swede from Anna Karenina. The ending was dark and haunting and I loved the movie.

Alex Garland's follow-up, Annihilation, is a little harder for me to grasp. It works on a much larger canvas. Rather than setting a few characters in a room, it sends them off into a mysterious forest. The cast is a little larger and a little less designed for me to immediately fall in love with. The ending is dark but less certain, and I'm not sure how I feel about the movie as a whole.

The film begins with Lena (Natalie Portman), still trying to get over the loss of her husband (Oscar Isaac), who has been missing for 12 months on a special ops mission. Then, without warning, her husband returns one night, a stoic shell of who he used to be. This leads to both of them being abducted by a stealth government agency and brought to a facility down in, I think, Louisiana. This facility is on the edge of a mysterious location called "The Shimmer". The Shimmer is this expanding bubble created by an alien force. Lena's husband went in there 12 months ago on an exploratory mission and is so far the only person to ever come out of it. So, Lena joins a group of female scientists to explore the Shimmer to get answers about what happened to her husband. As you can imagine, the group slowly gets picked off by the creatures in there as they move closer to the lighthouse where all this began. Oh, and the life inside the Shimmer is all mutated, combining multiple species.

I'm sure I left out a few key details there. There's a lot going on with the story. This is a much more ambitious film than Ex Machina. I'll be honest, I'm still trying to make sense of enough of this movie, that I'm not sure how useful this Reaction is going to be. Annihilation is an example of creating a Sci Fi world with a lot of mysteries and only answering the questions that need to be answered. There are a lot of loose ends in the film. Intentional loose ends, but loose ends nonetheless. I have trouble with movies that do this, mainly because I'm never sure whether it's bold filmmaking or a narrative cop-out. Anyone can create a lot of questions. It's harder to have answers. I actually do think Garland has more answers than I picked up on. As I mentioned, the movie confused me a bit.

I couldn't stop thinking about other movies when I was watching Annihilation. There's a lot of Contact in this. Bits of Arrival too with some of the mind games being played. There are countless movies about exploring abandoned alien planets or vessels that it reminded me of (most of the Alien series, in fact). I even got hints of Under the Skin in how the movie played with silences and foreign noises. Ex Machina wasn't wholly new either. It was a fresh slant on familiar structures though. Annihilation feels more like an amalgamation of other stories without adding anything new from the combination.

Natalie Portman is very good at the center of the movie. She's worked in enough kinds of movies, they I can buy her as a former army badass who became a biology professor. She's played both parts before and knows how to carry herself for each. Part of what worked so well in Ex Machina was that the limited cast (3 characters, give or take a robot) allowed Garland the time to build a few really great, complex characters. Annihilation has to spread that out with a larger cast. Oscar Isaac spends most of the movie shell-shocked, which is a bit of a waste. The other scientists are played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, and Tuva Novotny. They are all playing types more than fully formed characters. They do well, but mostly exist to be picked off and symbolize all the effects of the Shimmer on people. One represents that random external danger. Another is the internal danger and the mind games. One submits to the power of the Shimmer. Another fights like hell to get it before it can get her. I'm not sure there's a better way to handle this. I just wish there was. Oh, and poor Benedict Wong's entire performance is inside a biohazzard suit.

Annihilation has a lot of talent on display. The world inside the Shimmer has some beautiful touches. The visual effects look good. The sound is often unsettling. The performances by the actors are better than the characters. Garland's direction is confident. It all felt more like a tryout for a franchise movie than a bold new vision*. Perhaps Ex Machina set my expectations too high. Annihilation is good, not great.

*Btw, if Garland wanted to director a Star Wars movie, I'd be cool with that.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend