Many modern film adaptations of popular novels are slavish to their source material. Admirably, Alex Garland doesn’t so much adapt Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation so much as he riffs on the novel’s trippy happenings, creating something almost entirely his own. Garland has the genre bona fides, and the writer of Sunshine and writer-director of Ex Machina handles Annihilation’s hallucinatory setting with an apt and compelling sense of shifting unreality. But by leaning too hard on clichés—and almost tumbling over into sexism—he proves that he wasn’t the ideal writer-director for this job.
Natalie Portman stars as Lena, a Johns Hopkins University biology professor and Army vet mourning her covert-ops husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), who disappeared a year ago while on a mission. Then he turns up at their home—confused, unaffectionate, and bleeding from the nose. The ambulance she calls for him is cut off by an armada of black SUVs, out of which pour armed men who remove Kane and sedate Lena. She’s subsequently brought to Area X, a secretive government base observing a mysterious ecological, and perhaps divine or extraterrestrial, phenomenon that’s referred to as the Shimmer—the place where Kane had been, and from where he and he alone has inexplicably returned.
What’s happening in that tropical landscape—mostly contained within a national park, though its borders are expanding—is, well, super weird, involving a possibly alien recalibration of all DNA and organic matter: Plants are shaped like people, alligators are crossbreeding with sharks, and human consciousness is being imprinted onto hideous boar-bear hybrids. The Shimmer is a realm of biological fluidity, as if all cells were being mixed together in a big pot and ladled back out into the world in all sorts of wacky combinations.
Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s score evokes that unsteady imbalance, mixing acoustic, finger-pickin’ folk with dissonant droning, respectively evoking the organic and the inhuman. Cinematographer Rob Hardy captures the Shimmer in hyper-surrealistic fashion: The film’s images often looks as though they were shot through melting glass, illuminated with all the colors of a pastel rainbow—and midday skies sparkle with rays of orange and purple. Early on, a striking close-up of Lena and Kane holding hands across a table is lensed through a glass of water, beautifully suggesting Annihilation’s swirling sense of the impermanence of all things.
On the page, VanderMeer envelops us into the enigmas of characters and setting. By contrast, Garland patiently establishing the characters, their realities, and the place they’re heading into, structuring the film like a kaleidoscopic, psychedelic detective story. As Lena teams up with a squad of female scientists—led by Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and including Anya Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez), Cass Sheppard (Tuva Novotny), and Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson)—heading into the Shimmer to investigate it, Annihilation gets momentum from the deeper it pushes into the uncertainties of ecology and the self. The members of previous expeditions have either been killed by whatever lies within, or gone mad and killed each other.
The things that the team find inside the Shimmer are frightening and bizarre, building up to a climax in which one character turns into a ball of light and another is trapped in a pas de deux with a mercury-skinned mimic. Another one had already wandered off willfully to become a tree, a rather lazy way of writing off a character who’s no longer narratively necessary. Many of VanderMeer’s most outlandish details, however, have been cut. There’s no slug monster made of light transcribing apocalyptic sermons in fungus along the breathing walls of a submerged tower. In fact, the tower—the novel’s most significant location—barely appears. But that’s fine, as Garland should be free to do to the book what the Shimmer does to living things.
What’s much more disappointing is that he’s taken VanderMeer’s cold, complex, powerful, and unnamed hero and not only given her a name but also reduced her to action-movie clichés: good with a gun and calm under pressure, but in love with her husband, and warm and friendly when she finally opens up. The scientists are strong women, for sure, which are always a welcome sight in a wide-release American film and would-be blockbuster. But most of them are also given basic backstories, from one having lost a daughter to another cutting herself. Garland tries too hard to make these characters relatable in predictably “feminine” ways—as partners and caregivers, to themselves and others, which is to say, as specifically emotional beings—instead of just emphasizing through cinema their basic humanity.
Image/Sound
Paramount’s Blu-ray is true to the film’s theatrical presentation, for better and worse. The transfer captures the nuances of the film’s advanced lighting techniques, from the blazing intensity of manmade light that burns through the starless night within the Shimmer to the complex refractions of sunlight into hazy, impressionistic blotches. However, darker scenes with significant backlighting do betray instances of image crushing, mostly located around the on-screen light sources. Audio, however, is issue-free, with a Dolby Atmos track that thunders with the percolating treble and synthesized moans of Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s score. The score is evenly distributed among all speakers, creating an enveloping wall of noise that aurally reflects the disorientation of the Shimmer. Other sounds are more delicately threaded across the mix, such as the distant screams of a team member believed dead, or the ambient hum of forest life and wind rippling through overgrown grass.
Extras
Three half-hour mini-features, each divided into two parts, chart the evolution of Annihilation, beginning with Jeff VanderMeer’s approach to writing the novel on which the film is based. The features are split evenly between perfunctory gushing over cast and crew and a deeper analysis of the film’s subject matter and production. Alex Garland’s tendency to reuse the same crew results in some perceptive interviews with longtime collaborators who place the film within the larger context of the director’s filmography. The most illuminating material concerns the way the crew conceived the terraformed flora and fauna of Area X as well as the non-Euclidean shape of the alien.
Overall
Annihilation only gets better and more thought-provoking with each viewing, and Paramount’s Blu-ray, which is most notable for its reference-level soundtrack, stays true to the film’s mutative beauty.
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