'Annihilation' - Review

★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

Alex Garland’s sophomore film as writer-director, based on the book by Jeff VanderMeer, is a sci-fi oddity packed with questions and imagery which overwhelm and outshine its strong cast. Natalie Portman is Lena, a biologist sent to investigate a strange occurrence known as the Shimmer when her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) returns after going missing on his own expedition, wracked with strange symptoms. Lena is joined by four other scientists (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez and Tuva Novotny) to venture past the Shimmer’s dripping rainbow barrier and into the unknown.

To have a major science fiction film headed up by five women is a wonderful prospect, but in the end their characters are secondary to the visuals and ideas. Portman, Thompson, Isaac and Jason Leigh have the most fleshed-out roles of the bunch, but the nature of their occupations and the unravelling plot means they have little room to display more than quiet disconnect and pure fear. Anyone who’s accused Christopher Nolan of being clinical will soon be admiring his more sentimental qualities after spending two hours in the company of biologists, psychologists and hazmat-suited observers armed with clipboards.

Now for the sadly unavoidable digression, given that yours truly is reviewing this film from the UK: Annihilation doesn’t belong on the straight-to-streaming pile. Its grandiose imagery and even larger ideas belong in a cinema, where an audience is paying directly (thereby showing more tangible support for cerebral sci-fi than a lone viewing statistic), breathing in the visuals from a pristine projection source and, most importantly, not tabbing out every five minutes to check Facebook. Whatever the objective flaws and merits of Netflix’ current sci-fi releases like Annihilation, The Cloverfield Paradox and Mute (the less said about Bright, the better), they’re shot with the big screen in mind. I can’t for one minute imagine Alex Garland or Duncan Jones conversing on-set with their director of photography about how best to shoot a sequence for optimal impact on a cropped desktop window. 

The best I could do to replicate a theatrical experience for Annihilation was a 23-inch monitor, turning all the lights off, putting on a decent pair of headphones with the volume up and praying my internet connection held long enough to retain maximum resolution. The latter proved the most unreliable element, meaning Rob Hardy’s eerie cinematography resembled something closer to Annihilation: The ZX Spectrum Experience. Drops in bitrate still failed to break the spell of a frightening, spine-chilling score from genius composers Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, returning from Ex Machina.

A few other elements from Garland’s previous directorial outing cling to the surface of Annihilation as it leaps from straight science fiction to bizarre, exploratory philosophy: there’s a lot of photography through glass (cell windows, the warped reflections of a glass of water), large gaps of ambiguous silence between dialogue and a frugal use of CGI. What digital imagery there is flits from astonishing to awkward. Where the VFX budget has been spent really shows, and the more questionable effects weirdly make the film feel more suited to its home platform doom.

As with Ex Machina’s tests, this film is fragmented into stages, each infused with a recurring close-up of dividing cells, an image echoed in the scientists’ continuing discoveries. Much as one cell becomes another, brief physical evidence (plants that have formed themselves into the shape of human bodies, skeletons arranged in the sand) spawns more mental imagery that is harder to shake, itself upstaged by succeeding sequences that teeter on the edge between dream and nightmare. A vignette in an abandoned swimming pool refused to leave the inside of my eyelids for several days.

Garland keeps this adherence to ‘less is more’ to a fault. So much of the screenplay revels in withholding information from the audience, and it’s difficult to decipher whether he’s leaving these questions unanswered or merely open to interpretations. This means Annihilation could be read as any number of things: for yours truly, it’s a fable about leaving the unknown alone, but you can also see commentaries on gender, mankind’s destruction of the environment, and what it means to be human. It’s a film of big ideas, and that’s something no amount of relegation to small screens can diminish.