The second film from director Alex Garland, Annihilation, is another sci-fi head-trip. The first definitions for “head-trip” that pop up on Google are: 1. An intellectually stimulating experience; 2. An act performed primarily for self-gratification. Garland’s first feature, Ex Machina, was a stunning and heady debut that fell squarely within the first definition. Annihilation is equally stunning, but falls somewhere between the two.
Though the film is best viewed with no prior knowledge of the story, it is based on a 2014 novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, which was inspired by his hiking experience through a wildlife refuge in Florida. Potential prior knowledge ahead (AKA spoiler alert). The film takes place in a similarly wild area of Florida where a meteor hits a lighthouse. Instead of an explosion, the meteor causes a shimmering aura to appear around the lighthouse. As the aura grows in diameter, top-secret government agencies evacuate the affected area and send in teams to investigate the strange phenomena.
Natalie Portman plays an ex-soldier-turned-biology professor whose husband was the only survivor of the latest expedition, and the only person to ever return from the shimmer. She joins a team of four to go into the shimmer to find out what happened to her husband’s team and learn more about what’s inside. It’s here where the movie really shines. The shimmer refracts the light like an oil-slick dome. Once inside, the world becomes a technicolor nightmare where pinks and blues and orange hues light up a landscape of equally vibrant mutated plant life. Lena (Portman) and the crew, led by Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), soon discover that the shimmer not only alters the landscape and wildlife, but also their memory and perception. The beauty of this familiar yet alien land is matched only by its lethality.
Their trek towards the heart of the shimmer—the lighthouse—is one of wonder and paranoia, but it is everything around that central journey that gums up the works. I’m rarely one to decry too much story in movies, but the frequent use of dreams as flashbacks does more to interrupt the momentum than build intrigue. Similarly, the world of the rainbow hellscape is almost too interesting for its own good, nearly collapsing under the weight of the necessity of a final act. Speaking of the ending, it aspired to a revelatory apex of 2001 proportions but landed as puddle-deep weirdness, at least to this reviewer. Still, see Annihilation for the journey, not the destination.
