Is it possible for a movie to be too successful at achieving its goals — so good at its intentions that it becomes more of an intellectual exercise than an emotional experience? I would argue that this has happened with Annihilation, the new science-fiction film from visionary writer-director Alex Garland. His film is so fixated on creating and sustaining an “alien-ness” that it finally loses touch with its human side.
Garland’s film depicts a strange alien invasion: a meteorite lodges in a lighthouse and the strange life it carries begins to expand from there. It creates a “shimmer” which gradually changes whatever it touches on a cellular level — and the shimmer area is slowly expanding. A scientist-soldier (Natalie Portman) accompanies three other female scientists into the shimmer region to investigate and, hopefully, stop the phenomenon while it is still possible to do so.
It’s a great premise, and Garland creates a strange, beautiful, terrifying place where nature is running amok here on Earth. Left alone, it is inevitable that the shimmer would continue to grow and desperate measures would have to be taken to destroy it, which might or might not work. But that’s where the people come in, and where the film begins to unravel. Everybody has an agenda, and eventually everyone becomes more symbolic than flesh and blood. Garland’s characters seem to make decisions based on the script’s needs rather than common sense.
Ultimately the film pushes its weirdness, its innate alienness, far past believability into a realm of “what if?”. That direction, of course, is the essence of science-fiction — and yet I disconnected from it about two-thirds of the way in. Suddenly it lost its grip on how people actually act and think in favor of some larger exploration of life in the universe. It lost me, which is a shame, because it is definitely visionary in many respects. And its ending is a cop out, setting up a possible continuation of the story without any sensible foundation for such a scenario. ☆ ☆ 1/2. 25 March 2018.