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The film opens with a fiery, asteroid-like body striking a lighthouse somewhere on the Gulf Coast, leaving not destruction and calamity in its wake, only a prismatic, oily aura. (Right then and there, Annihilation announces itself as less of an explosion movie and more of an unexplainably unsettling oily aura movie.)
- Vulture review
Five female scientists venture into the weird bubble; only one returns. What's inside is both beautiful and horrific; they and everything inside are changed in beautiful and horrifying ways.
"Take a dangerous trip into an unknown place surrounded by mystery, from which few or none have ever returned" is one of my favorite tropes. Over-explaining is the death of it. Frederik Pohl's Gateway, in which people set out in abandoned alien spaceships for unknown destinations, hoping to get rich but mostly dying or never coming back, was throughly satisfying because it explored the mystery without ever solving it. The sequels explained everything and were terrible. Annihilation, very satisfyingly, delves into the mystery without dissipating it.
I think today is the last day it's in theaters in the US. I saw it last night because it sounded like the sort of movie you should see on the big screen if you want to see it, and that was a good choice. I hadn't intended to see it as I didn't like the preview and thought it was more of a standard horror movie than it is; consequently, I read a lot of spoilers that then convinced me to see it. Knowing a lot of what happened didn't ruin it for me, nor did it really prepare me, as it's not so much about what happens as how it happens and what it's like to watch it unfold.
Annihilation is a science fiction/horror movie loosely based on a book series I haven't read because it's by Jeff Vandermeer, whose prose style bugs me. Apparently the director, Alex Garland, read the first book and then made the movie years later without re-reading it, based on his recollections. Based on seeing the movie, this sounds extremely plausible. I don't mean that as an insult. It feels like a dream recalled.
If you're trying to decide if you want to see it based on how scary/gross it is, it has some very scary moments, some very gory moments, a lot of body horror and disturbing imagery, and implications ranging from unsettling to nightmarish. It does not have jump scares. It also has a lot of very beautiful imagery (much of it also unsettling/creepy) and a lot of sense of wonder. It's mostly slow and meditative and about exploring a strange new world.
I knew there was some sort of time dilation involved, but I was not expecting that the very first scene after they passed through the Shimmer would be them waking up and realizing that they'd already been there for days and had no recollection of any of it. That very effectively set up a sense of disorientation which continued for the entire rest of the thing.
When Josie becomes a plant person, we never see the plants on her body growing. There's just more every time it cuts back to her. That made the scene so much weirder and more surreal than the other option. For one thing, the first time or two, I wondered if there really were more than the last time, or if I was misremembering or just seeing a different angle. Then, when it's clear that there really are more, the way it's cut seems like there's more because there was a time lapse rather than that they're growing super-fast. But there can't be a time lapse, because it's all happening during a normal-speed, real-time conversation, and then a normal-speed, real-time pursuit.
Or is any of it really real-time? We already know there's time dilation. Was that entire sequence taking place over a period of weeks or more, without the characters realizing? That would explain why Josie seemed to transform so quickly at the end. Maybe a week passed between when she reached the clearing with the other plant-people, and when Lena entered it and couldn't tell which one she was.
That screaming bear was the most horrific part of the entire movie for me, and the bit where Josie suggests that the screams weren't just mimicking, but a living part of Sheppard wins the prize for horrifying implications.
I don't think the movie needed the scenes of Lena being interrogated. They didn't add anything.
So, the end. The scene where Lena walks on the beach among the crystal trees was incredibly beautiful. I also liked the skeletons, which look half like a ritual arrangement and half like they'd grown there. And Dr. Ventress's death/dissolution was beautiful and awful and right: she thought she'd be annihilated, and she was: unlike everyone else, she left nothing behind, not a body, not a voice, not a plant, just essential particles stripped of their identity, from which something else could grow. She divides into a million cells, like the cancer cells that were killing her.
I probably don't even need to mention the womb/birth imagery of the hole and the tunnel and the black chamber, but I will mention that I liked how the stark whiteness of the lighthouse was reminiscent of the hospitals where we're born, where our cancer gets treated, and where we die.
Was that Original!Lena but with the Shimmer now within her? Or was the last narrative we saw the Doppelganger's invention, and this is Doppelgänger!Lena? I don't like that idea, mostly because if so, then it casts retroactive doubt over the entire narrative of what happened in the Shimmer. But that would explain why the Doppelgänger stopped mirroring Lena at the end - in this case, she never did, but she survived the fire while Original!Lena couldn't.
On the other hand, the Kane Doppelgänger had clearly also stopped mirroring his movements before his death. In that case, what makes them stop? Is there some sort of differentiation point, where they become an independent version of the original? Kane told his to go back to Lena, and it did; Lena told hers to die, and it did.
I really wanted Lena to reply to Kane's "Are you Lena?" with "I don't know."
- Vulture review
Five female scientists venture into the weird bubble; only one returns. What's inside is both beautiful and horrific; they and everything inside are changed in beautiful and horrifying ways.
"Take a dangerous trip into an unknown place surrounded by mystery, from which few or none have ever returned" is one of my favorite tropes. Over-explaining is the death of it. Frederik Pohl's Gateway, in which people set out in abandoned alien spaceships for unknown destinations, hoping to get rich but mostly dying or never coming back, was throughly satisfying because it explored the mystery without ever solving it. The sequels explained everything and were terrible. Annihilation, very satisfyingly, delves into the mystery without dissipating it.
I think today is the last day it's in theaters in the US. I saw it last night because it sounded like the sort of movie you should see on the big screen if you want to see it, and that was a good choice. I hadn't intended to see it as I didn't like the preview and thought it was more of a standard horror movie than it is; consequently, I read a lot of spoilers that then convinced me to see it. Knowing a lot of what happened didn't ruin it for me, nor did it really prepare me, as it's not so much about what happens as how it happens and what it's like to watch it unfold.
Annihilation is a science fiction/horror movie loosely based on a book series I haven't read because it's by Jeff Vandermeer, whose prose style bugs me. Apparently the director, Alex Garland, read the first book and then made the movie years later without re-reading it, based on his recollections. Based on seeing the movie, this sounds extremely plausible. I don't mean that as an insult. It feels like a dream recalled.
If you're trying to decide if you want to see it based on how scary/gross it is, it has some very scary moments, some very gory moments, a lot of body horror and disturbing imagery, and implications ranging from unsettling to nightmarish. It does not have jump scares. It also has a lot of very beautiful imagery (much of it also unsettling/creepy) and a lot of sense of wonder. It's mostly slow and meditative and about exploring a strange new world.
I knew there was some sort of time dilation involved, but I was not expecting that the very first scene after they passed through the Shimmer would be them waking up and realizing that they'd already been there for days and had no recollection of any of it. That very effectively set up a sense of disorientation which continued for the entire rest of the thing.
When Josie becomes a plant person, we never see the plants on her body growing. There's just more every time it cuts back to her. That made the scene so much weirder and more surreal than the other option. For one thing, the first time or two, I wondered if there really were more than the last time, or if I was misremembering or just seeing a different angle. Then, when it's clear that there really are more, the way it's cut seems like there's more because there was a time lapse rather than that they're growing super-fast. But there can't be a time lapse, because it's all happening during a normal-speed, real-time conversation, and then a normal-speed, real-time pursuit.
Or is any of it really real-time? We already know there's time dilation. Was that entire sequence taking place over a period of weeks or more, without the characters realizing? That would explain why Josie seemed to transform so quickly at the end. Maybe a week passed between when she reached the clearing with the other plant-people, and when Lena entered it and couldn't tell which one she was.
That screaming bear was the most horrific part of the entire movie for me, and the bit where Josie suggests that the screams weren't just mimicking, but a living part of Sheppard wins the prize for horrifying implications.
I don't think the movie needed the scenes of Lena being interrogated. They didn't add anything.
So, the end. The scene where Lena walks on the beach among the crystal trees was incredibly beautiful. I also liked the skeletons, which look half like a ritual arrangement and half like they'd grown there. And Dr. Ventress's death/dissolution was beautiful and awful and right: she thought she'd be annihilated, and she was: unlike everyone else, she left nothing behind, not a body, not a voice, not a plant, just essential particles stripped of their identity, from which something else could grow. She divides into a million cells, like the cancer cells that were killing her.
I probably don't even need to mention the womb/birth imagery of the hole and the tunnel and the black chamber, but I will mention that I liked how the stark whiteness of the lighthouse was reminiscent of the hospitals where we're born, where our cancer gets treated, and where we die.
Was that Original!Lena but with the Shimmer now within her? Or was the last narrative we saw the Doppelganger's invention, and this is Doppelgänger!Lena? I don't like that idea, mostly because if so, then it casts retroactive doubt over the entire narrative of what happened in the Shimmer. But that would explain why the Doppelgänger stopped mirroring Lena at the end - in this case, she never did, but she survived the fire while Original!Lena couldn't.
On the other hand, the Kane Doppelgänger had clearly also stopped mirroring his movements before his death. In that case, what makes them stop? Is there some sort of differentiation point, where they become an independent version of the original? Kane told his to go back to Lena, and it did; Lena told hers to die, and it did.
I really wanted Lena to reply to Kane's "Are you Lena?" with "I don't know."
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