★ ★ ★ 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.
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.
