All-female cast captures fear, curiosity of Annihilation
The makers of Annihilation offer up a different feel for latest big-screen sci-fi adventure
We have mapped the Earth’s surface, but the creatures that live on it continue to elude us. Every year brings news of thousands of newly discovered plant and animal species, some large (a new kind of orangutan was confirmed last year), some small (the dragon ant of Papua New Guinea) and many whimsical, like a spider that looks like a Harry Potter sorting hat, named Eriovixia gryffindori. The biosphere will always surprise.
So perhaps the root of the story that is Annihilation is not as farfetched as it might at first seem. The first third of the Southern Reach trilogy, written by Jeff VanderMeer and loosely adapted for the screen by director Alex Garland (Ex Machina), it imagines a corner of Florida where biology has run amok, creating monstrous creatures and playing havoc with radio waves and even the brainwaves of those brave or foolhardy enough to intrude.
The latest team to enter “the Shimmer,” as it’s become known, is led by psychologist Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and includes a paramedic (Gina Rodriguez), an anthropologist (Tuva Novotny) and a physicist (Tessa Thompson). As the team’s only Oscar-winner, Natalie Portman gets top billing on the poster. But her character also has an interesting background, being both a biologist and a soldier. And her husband (Oscar Isaac) was the only member of a previous team to return, although something about him is off-puttingly different.
The screenplay, a little out of chronological order as though refracted through a prism, throws this team and viewers alike into a confusing but captivating mystery. Three or maybe four days into their trek through the Shimmer, the women realize they’ve completely lost track of
time. They come across a weirdly, wildly overgrown and hard-tokill crocodile. Later they will be visited by a bearlike creature that is almost guaranteed to make a return appearance in your next nightmare.
Meanwhile, the film’s soundtrack teases us with familiarity, only to yank it away: acoustic guitars one moment, the next it sounds like a drunken church choir trying to sing during a thunderstorm. There’s even a love song, Helplessly Hoping, by Crosby, Stills & Nash.
The novel and the movie exist as separate and equally enjoyable entities. I scurried out to buy a copy of the book after watching the film, and found it refreshingly unique. Garland says he read the source material but once and then set it aside and basically filmed his memory of the experience of reading it.
The result is the feeling of entering a dream or a trance, but the enigma never feels capricious. There’s an underlying, fractured logic at work here. Note, for instance, the weird deer that Portman’s character sees moving in perfect unison, and keep an eye out for other duplications and replications. Annihilation is a film that doubles down on both its science and its terror.
The actors do a good job of inhabiting the twilight zone between professional curiosity and personal fear, each one clearly trying to make sense of the oddities that surrounds her, and suppressing the amygdala’s fight-or-flight messages with varying degrees of success. The all-female cast is lifted from the book (published in 2014) but feels oddly of-the-moment as Hollywood continues to grapple with #TimesUp issues. Refreshingly, little is said of the team’s same-sex makeup. What do they have in common? They’re all scientists.
The screenplay, a little out of chronological order as though refracted through a prism, throws this team ... into a confusing but captivating mystery.
These are strange days for movies. Today’s blockbuster quickly winds up on tomorrow’s laptop or iPhone, shrunk from the size of a billboard to that of the ticket that let you see it. And increasingly the movies skip the cinema altogether. Such was the fate of Annihilation, a science-fiction horror from writer-director Alex Garland (Ex Machina), based on the first part of Jeff VanderMeer’s bestselling Southern Reach trilogy.
Originally set for a worldwide release in cinemas this week, Netflix picked up the film when producers feared it was too cerebral for a mass audience. It will now open on the big screen in Canada, the U.S. and China, but on the streaming service only in the rest of the world.
Garland isn’t happy about that, but he’s careful to contain his criticism. “I don’t want to say anything which sounds disparaging about the small screen,” he begins. “I’m about to try to do something for the small screen. Some of the best, most interesting and most sophisticated drama around at the moment is on the small screen, and it’s been that way for quite some time.
“But you work according to the medium you’re working in, and some of this film is explicitly designed to be seen on a big screen. You would do it differently if you knew you were making it for televisions and laptops. So it’s very frustrating, particularly the last half-hour of the film, when dialogue is largely jettisoned in favour of imagery and sound design and music. There’s a lot of hard work by a lot of people that is diminished.”
Small screen or large, Annihilation makes for a fascinating adaptation. “I tried something really weird,” Garland says. “I don’t think I would have tried this when I was younger. I would have been too nervous. But I’m long in the tooth now.” (He’s 47.) “Rather than reread the book and use a highlighter and pick out sections to zero in on, what I did was I never reread the book. I wrote the adaptation as a memory of the book, and what that did was give it a kind of a dream state of a dream state. So in some ways it correlates quite closely and in some ways it diverges in quite significant ways.”
For instance, fans of VanderMeer will notice right away that the characters now have names — in the book they’re identified only by job title — and that while the lighthouse remains a central location, a nearby tunnel (or is it buried tower?) is mostly absent. On the other hand, the film retains the all-female cast of scientist-explorers from the book, headed up by Natalie Portman and including
I don’t think I would have tried this when I was younger. I would have been too nervous. DIRECTOR ALEX GARLAND
Gina Rodriguez and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It’s a welcome counterweight in a traditionally male-dominated genre, although Garland isn’t taking any credit for that.
“It’s not prescient at all,” he says dryly. “It’s very, very late.”
Garland first found fame as a writer. His 1996 novel The Beach was made into a 2000 film by Danny Boyle, and he later wrote the screenplays for Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Sunshine. Asked if Ex Machina and Annihilation can be seen as companion pieces dealing with humanity’s existential fears of (broadly speaking) technology and ecology, he recalls something Kazuo Ishiguro told him when he was adapting Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. “He said writers are always basically telling one story, which the different narratives are almost chapters of, because it’s a continuum. It’s part of a single thread.”
Then again, Ex Machina was Garland’s own story, whereas Annihilation is his recollection of someone else’s.
“But broadly speaking that’s what happens with every narrative,” he says.
“Whenever you give a story to someone, you’re not actually giving them 100 per cent of a story. You’re giving them half a story, and the other half is provided by them — their subjective opinions, obsessions and preoccupations.
“When I was reading the book I was thinking: What is my main experience of reading it? And what I got to was that it wasn’t located precisely in what was happening. It was more in the atmosphere and sensation of reading it, which was more dreamlike.”