Although
this is a science fiction film, it would make an interesting double-bill with The Ritual, which is unashamedly a
horror film. This concerns a group of
women lost in a savage wilderness, with purpose and motivation; that concerns a
group of men lost in a wilderness, by accident, with no purpose and no clue. It’s interesting to compare and contrast how
they cope.
But, to
establish its enlightened science fiction credentials, before it sinks into the
darkness of horror, the film’s first image is of a cell dividing. Biologist Lena (Natalie Portman) tells us
that four billion years ago, all life began with one cell, alone, utterly by
itself, dividing and doubling, then re-doubling, and so on.
All life, she
reminds us, animal and vegetable, is related.
Funny how no film has clocked that before. We have had biomechanical monsters, but have
we ever had biovegetable monsters before?
I don’t think even Cronenberg - who was obsessed with monsters spreading
and growing like cancer - made that leap.
Thinking it through, in Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (1956 and again in 1978 ... I ignore the subsequent
versions), those aliens were vegetables, but the films don’t really dwell on
that aspect of the invasion. They
concentrate instead on the existential notion of a human being replaced by an
identical copy and the paranoia of not knowing who is or isn’t real.
Annihilation also wanders fairly quickly
into that territory, when Lena’s husband returns, but is subtly changed, less
emotional, less human. He’s also been
missing for a year and she’d presumed him dead.
So she had lost the one she loved.
Like Katherine Waterstone’s character in Alien Covenant (2017). Like
in Amy Adams’ character in Arrival
(2016). Why is it that boy protagonists in
F&SF films are lost, but girl
protagonists have lost?
When she
touches her reappeared husband’s hand, we get the first of many subtle visual
metaphors ... Their hands are seen distorted through a glass of water - a
medium which warps and distorts - like The Shimmer, which takes life and alters
it, changes its shape and breaks down its barriers.
The Shimmer
is an area of disturbed and distorted land around the site of a crashed
meteor. The area is described as
possibly “a higher dimension?” - a veil which passes through to another
dimension, possibly. This is a notion
that viewers will be familiar with thanks to Stranger Things, but (as with everything else on that show) it
comes from somewhere else. You could
argue that the wardrobe (or the pools) in the Narnia books are gateways to other
dimensions ... But I think it is really H.P. Lovecraft we are leaning towards
here. His open doorways are to other
dimensions, and should have been kept shut.
Because, in those Lovecraft dimensions ... There be monsters!
We are told
that the military / scientific garrison encamped next to The Shimmer, have sent
in people and drones - and nothing has come back. But the film’s framing device has told us that
Lena gets back - so we know the dénouement of this story going in! Like a lot of science fiction, this is a why film, not a what film. It wants us to
think about the underlying cause of what we see, not just to sit and let events
wash over us.
It speaks
to the ambition of this film that the scenes of the soldier scientists
travelling through the alien wilderness, are set in broad daylight, and yet are
still deeply creepy. We’ve all seen
groups of male soldiers creeping through wilderness - from Deliverance (1972) and Southern
Comfort (1981), to Platoon (1986)
and Predator (1987), but simply
making the soldiers women makes the whole thing seem more unusual and unique. That said, the sequence when one of their number
goes mad and starts brandishing a gun, is undeniably reminiscent of Bill Paxton’s
turn in Aliens (1986). But, I think, Garfield is aware of these
precedents. At one point they find a
mini-gun and one of the soldier scientists (played by Gina Rodriguez) picks it
up, then announces: “This shit is heavy
... Can’t carry this”. She isn’t Vasquez
... She doesn’t feel like she has anything macho to prove.
 |
| The gang's all here: Arnie, Carl Weathers ... Sorry, I mean: Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton ... No, wait: Jennifer Jason Leigh, Natalie Portman, Tuva Novotny, Tessa Thompson and Gina Ridriguez. Lock 'n' load, ladies. |
The author
of the original Annihilation book,
Jeff VanderMeer, says that he hadn’t seen Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) when he wrote his novel, it isn’t a deliberate
influence. I don’t think he can lay
claim to being unaware of Lovecraft’s Colour
out of Space (1927), mind; which concerns a meteor which crashes to earth,
bringing alien life with it, which poisons a huge area of farm land known as ‘the
blasted heath’, wherein animals and plants mutate. In the novel Roadside Picnic, which Stalker
is loosely based upon, it is made clear (clearer than in the film), that ‘the
zone’ was created by aliens.
So, adapter
and director, Alex Garland has clearly seen a lot of Tarkovsky ... Lena’s
flashbacks to happy times with hubby have the feel of Solaris (1972), and the its flashbacks impinged on the subjective
reality of the present. The scenes of
the soldier scientists treading lightly through the wilderness have the feel of
Stalker ... Particularly in
terms of the eerie sounds that fill the
air. Of course, Tarkovsky’s toxic landscape was real, not created with careful
CGI as here. The cancers that grew in
the bodies of Tarkovsky’s crew, including the director, himself, were reputedly
developed because of the exposure to the chemical waste in those corrupt
industrial environments.
The notion
of cancer as a simple product of cell reproduction gone wrong, is a thread that
runs through the fabric of this film. During
one of the dreamy flashbacks, we are told that seeing the Moon in the daylight
feels like God made a mistake. Her
husband is religious, where she isn’t, and insists that God doesn’t make
mistakes. She promptly gives him an
example - telling him that ageing is a mistake that a cell makes - correct the
mistake and we’ll never age! The point
of this story is to plant the notion that our matter, our DNA, is editable,
reprogrammable and, therefore, the stuff of which we’re made can be
altered. That is an important idea that underscores
what we are seeing in The Shimmer.
Plants are
mutating, different species on the same vine, vivid multi-coloured molds are growing
on the trees. Lena describes the way the
organisms grow on each other as “malignant - like tumours”. The mutations “corruptions
of form ... duplicates of form ... echoes” get more obvious as the scientist
soldiers got closer to the centre of the anomaly. It is integral to the movie - down at the
bone-marrow level - for these characters to be women. The Shimmer is vibrant with life and, of
course, women are synonymous with the creation of life, so it is only right
that they should explore such a verdant place.
The
evidence of life changing - one could even say evolving - that they find inside
The Shimmer is both beautiful, in a painterly way, and grotesque. There are traumatising images in thee which
will live with you long after you’ve finished watching. We get moments of truly disturbing body
horror, and the evidence of spectacularly horrific events in the past - rather
like MacReady and his team stumbling on the frozen remains in the Norwegian
base, in The Thing (1982) - another
unisex film about isolation and duplication, which this movie quietly channels
and challenges.
 |
| Natalie Portman, submitting her audition tape, should they ever want to recast Ellen Ripley. |
Garland
resists the temptation to bombard us with what John Carpenter calls cattle-prods
(loud bangs to make the audience jump).
The film’s big set-piece is the attack of a skull-faced bear, which is
all the more shocking because there is no musical build-up to warn you it’s
coming ... Just the Stalker-like
eerie tone in the air immediately after.
Then there are the human voices in the music - umming and droning in a
style not dissimilar to the aliens in the Stargate sequence of 2001 (1968). It all fills the film with unfamiliar life.
This
sequence is unbearably tense (if you’ll pardon the pun) with one woman armed
and mad - although completely self-aware of her madness - one monster on the
loose, and three people gagged and tied to chairs. Very effective film making!
We see
everything with Lena - if she doesn’t see it, we don’t see it - we wake up when
she does, and wonder just how long she has slept, like she does. This is subjective film making, from the
point of view of a woman who can no longer trust her own senses.
However, if
we are to believe what we see - then
we see that light in The Shimmer diffracts.
It bends and splits - like light travelling through a prism, or through
water in a glass. The light of The
Shimmer doesn’t blend into the world - it diffracts - it sits in the air like
oil in water. Imposed upon it, not part
of it.
 |
| The alien's attempts to blend in seamlessly with human life produced some mixed results. |
The alien
growths are not integrated into life, they sit upon it, or grow through it and destroy it. The humanoid plants have human genes. Animal and plant has diffracted but, are they
plants with aspirations to be human, or humans who would prefer to be plants? Josie, the self-harming Physicist, clearly welcomes
the change. She goes native.
After this,
Lena, who is now alone, despairs and runs into the woods and - suddenly - finds
herself on the beach, by the lighthouse she has been seeking. Are we to believe this is literally
happening, or another hallucination? The
film doesn’t tell us, it leaves us room to speculate.
 |
| Flower to the people. |
Now, in its
dénouement, we are introduced to the third state of being: mineral. The sand of the beach is growing into crystal
trees, suggesting the minerals have memories of, or ambitions to become,
plants. Then Lena finds her actual
husband - his body has transformed from organic to mineral. A cinder shaped like a man, that maybe
retained memories of once being a man.
Inside the
alien’s chamber (which looks way too much like an extruded egg-chamber from Aliens - one visual reference too many,
methinks), Lena finally meets the alien - and it is truly alien. It is a cloud - glowing like a black hole in
reverse. It communicates through music -
deep, disturbing industrial synthetic sounds - after a soundtrack which has,
hitherto, been entirely acoustic and human.
The alien creates an avatar of Lena, which doesn’t move independently of
her, it mirrors her. Mimicking her, but
not perfectly. It imitates her
physically, where the skull-faced bear imitated its victim audibly. This suggests that the alien influence isn’t
really fundamentally changing life, just mimicking it. Echoing it.
When it
touches her, the mimicry becomes complete.
It stops diffracting her and starts to reflect her. It doesn’t understand fire - burning is just
another state change to the alien, as with Lena’s husband, who changed from
organic to charcoal. So, burning the
alien, isn’t really going to kill it, since it seems to exist at a
sub-molecular level - like Carpenter’s Thing, it will just mutate and evolve
and move on to a new medium. It’ll never
go away, it’ll just go on.
This is a
sufficiently chilling thought, that the film earns its cheesy horror-movie ‘surprise’
ending.
Garland has
humanised the characters as best he can.
In the novel (as in Stalker)
the characters have no names, only job descriptions. Here, he has named them - even though it’s
easier, in a film, to do away with names.
Portman’s Lena is the emotional heart of the film - but she isn’t the
hysterical girl tripping over tree roots, nor is she the hysterical romantic
desperate to rescue her man; she’s a capable scientist and ex-soldier - they
all are. This film is very positive in
its depiction of women as protagonists and as active agents.
The rest of
the cast carry a significant burden - having to impart a lot of exposition,
whilst creating a distinctive and engaging character. Swedish actress Tuva Novotny is particularly effective as Sheppard, who is the first
trooper to befriend Lena. I had a
problem with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Ventress, though. Twenty-five years ago, Leigh was, in my
estimation, the best actress working in Hollywood - in films like Rush (1991), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and Mrs
Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) there was no-one who could touch her
for intelligent, intense performances.
She’s still interesting and very watchable - but, here, she just sounds
interminably bored. I presume that was
an acting choice. It’s almost like she’s
been cloned before the film begins!
Never-the-less,
Annihilation is the smartest and most
involving film I’ve seen in some time. It
is visually sumptuous and subtle. It
treats the audience with intelligence, and rewards the application of that
intelligence. It benefitted from a
second viewing and I await, with anticipation, the disc release with,
hopefully, a pile of extras from Alex Garland discussing his take on the film.
Then I can
watch it back-to-back with The Ritual.
Writer/Director: Alex Garland
Cert: 15
Dur: 115 mins
Dur: 115 mins
