Annihilation: Breathtaking, Scary, but Ultimately Empty.
Let me start off by saying that I absolutely loved Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation. It was thoughtful, unique in its genre, and relied on both subtle body horror and existential intrigue to make it engaging. Alex Garland’s cinematic counterpart threw all of that out the window. Visually, there were certainly positives, but thematically it was a major let-down.
Vandermeer’s book walks the reader through an ecosystem thriving with life, pumping and alive with strange but beautiful flora. His prose observes this world through the eyes of a curious biologist. In the book, this mutated beauty is one of the things that draws Lena (the protagonist) into the world of Area X. To the movie’s credit, this was one of the few things that it got right. The scenery of Area X, an infested swampland just outside of the Southern Reach, was stunningly, viscerally portrayed. There was psychedelic fungus and deer with trees twisting and growing from their antlers and budding into gorgeous pink spring blooms. There were swathes of varied flowers all growing from the same stem, and there were crystal trees shooting up from the sands of the beach, tinkling and shimmering in the sun as the fading light lowered itself against the body of the ocean. Absolutely stunning cinematography and visuals. This aspect of the movie drew me in.
Secondly, if I can separate the movie from the book for a moment, the movie succeeds in its terror, even if the terror is less cerebral and more jump-scare than its counterpart. There is a scene where the characters are in a house and they hear the screams of one of their party members outside, only to find that her screams are coming from the mouth of a decomposing bear-wolf. Much like the Leucrotta of my D&D days, it had subsumed her voice into its being to use as bait, mirroring perfectly the tendency of the tainted ecosystem, taking in everything around it. This scene was deeply unsettling, as I believe it was meant to be. There was also a scene where the ecosystem takes over a man’s innards and turns them into writhing worms. It was pretty disgusting. We get it Alex, you can make us squirm…just like the worms. Ew.
However, looking past the visuals and Natalie Portman’s acting, which was superb as always, the movie was flawed on a basic level. When a writer decides to make a screen adaptation of a book, I can forgive plot differences if the ethos and thematic elements of the movie are developed in a creative way. Here, they were not. The beautiful visuals of the movie devolved into themes wholly separate from the unique and interesting premise that I found in the book.
The acting, besides Portman, was also sub-par, and noticeably so. Her performance is dragged down by the various other casting choices. While we do see Oscar Isaac (who I liked very much as Poe Dameron in Star Wars), he spends much of the movie pretending to be dead inside and is generally uninteresting. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s acting (the Psychologist) was also flat and scripted, which didn’t surprise me. She was equally unexciting in The Machinist.
Perhaps some of this is due to the oversimplification of the characters. The Psychologist becomes a cancer-victim with a death-wish instead of a cunning manipulator of people who uses hypnosis, and other subtler methods, to control the other team members. Read the book. She’s a great character. Lena’s husband also becomes a mere plot device. Most disappointingly, Natalie Portman’s character is flat compared to how she is presented in the book, where she volunteers to go on the mission and is drawn to the burgeoning ecosystem out of curiosity as a biologist who busies herself with her passions while her husband is away. In the book, she isn’t pining or angsty as she is in the movie, but rather spends her time studying tide pools and ecosystems and flora. She keeps busy with what she loves.
In the movie, the ecosystem that begins to take over is a terrifying, mutated enemy. In the book, Lena isn’t sure what to think of it and operates out of curiosity until she finally becomes one with it and presumably decides not to go back to life outside. She becomes a part of the metaphorical tide pools she spends so much time studying. She is compelling, curious, and her narrative’s resolution is unique. In the movie, she is turned into a stereotypical self-destructive lonely person. This doesn’t interest me.
This leads me to my most significant criticism of the movie. It felt confused, like it wanted to say many different things but didn’t say any of them completely. It was half-baked. In the book, the themes are fascinating and fully developed. Lena becomes one with the ecosystem that the Southern Reach is so afraid of, and in her curiosity she takes the reader through an exploration of resigning one’s self to mortality as she resigns herself to her part in a larger biological system. In some ways, she finds the deconstruction of herself into something bigger to be beautiful, albeit excruciating. In the movie, she is lonely because her husband is gone, so she cheats on him, then goes into Area X seemingly out of boredom more than anything else. Then she just so happens to find him again. It didn’t make sense.
In summary, this was a visually stunning movie with little depth that used common tropes to put skin on the bones of what could have been a much more compelling story. I think I can safely say that I would feel the same way even if I hadn’t read the book, but the depth of the book absolutely made my expectations higher than they maybe should have been. Maybe you enjoyed it and, in many ways, I still enjoyed it too. I felt scared when I should have been. I got caught up in the world like I was supposed to. I just felt that with such a great existential canvas to paint on — and one of the great lead actresses of our time — the director could have crafted more than a confusing, skin-deep horror movie set in a world of colorful plants.
