Biology runs amok in sci-fi adventure
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
The screenplay, a little out of chronological order as though refracted through a prism, throws this team ... into a confusing but captivating mystery.
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-sexmakeup.Whatdothey have in common? They’re all scientists.
“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,” young Spencer Stone says as he kneels to pray in Clint Eastwood’s recent factbased thriller, The 15:17 to Paris.
The boy will grow up to fulfil that wish as a young man, when he and his two childhood buddies, Alek Skarlatos and Anthony Sadler, help thwart a terrorist attack in 2015 on a train headed to Paris from Amsterdam. But coming from a kid who wears camouflage to Catholic school, houses a small arsenal of paintball guns and dreams idly of the “brotherhood” of war, the prayer of St. Francis sounds a little like Samuel L. Jackson’s hit man citing Ezekiel 25:17 in Pulp Fiction, an ominous promise of bloody righteousness.
For Stone, an instrument of peace could be a gun, or a fist or the jiu-jitsu chokehold he used to subdue terrorist Ayoub El-Khazzani. The 15:17 to Paris treats Stone’s story as a case of divine destiny. Stone talks about being “catapulted” toward a moment when his purpose will be revealed, and Eastwood hangs on every word. The director sees Stone and his buddies as heroes, the type of guys willing to assert themselves when others’ lives are on the line.
The film is a tribute to them, just as Eastwood’s last two efforts, Sully and American Sniper, are tributes to Chesley (Sully) Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who pulled off an emergency landing on the Hudson River, and Chris Kyle, the marksman who tallied the most kills in the Iraq War. Where many directors might have asked Stone, Skarlatos and Sadler to serve as technical consultants, Eastwood has them play themselves, gambling that their authenticity will outweigh any acting deficiencies.
The combination of a director famous for shooting scenes in very few takes with people who need coaching seems like a recipe for disaster, but their stilted performances are part of the point. They are non-actors and The 15:17 to Paris sometimes has the quality of a documentary about a European vacation that goes horribly wrong.
Sullenberger, Kyle and the three guys in The 15:17 to Paris are Eastwood heroes, straight shooters, figuratively and literally. They carry over from Eastwood’s career as an actor, too, from his portrayal of the Man With No Name in A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, to Dirty Harry in the 1971 thriller and its sequels. We recognize the type in many of the films Eastwood has directed, too — Westerns such as High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and Unforgiven — and his historical dramas, such as his 2006 Second World War pictures, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima.
A stoic minimalism has been Eastwood’s mantra from the start. Yet still waters run deep. Accepting the responsibility of thwarting a terrorist or landing a commercial airliner on water means accepting the burdens, too. Beyond the obvious understanding that death could be a consequence of heroic action, there are also the traumas of survival.
In Flags of Our Fathers, the six servicemen made famous for raising the flag at Iwo Jima have to live with the fictions of their memorialization, on top of the horrors of a war that continued after the famous photograph. Kyle of American Sniper spends so much time immersed in war and death that re-acclimating to everyday life becomes impossible. Even Sully, who saved everyone on his aircraft through nonviolent means, is visited by nightmares of what might have happened if his decision or execution turned out to be wrong.
Eastwood’s masterpiece, Unforgiven, could be read as an apology for his previous work, the laments of a career-long gunslinger.
As his Bill Munny, a former bandit turned vigilante, descends on Big Whiskey, Wyo., to collect a bounty on two cowboys accused of disfiguring a prostitute, the film treats him as a condemned man, made hollow by a sinful life. But Munny’s cause in Unforgiven is nonetheless a righteous one, just like that of every other Eastwood hero, and he’s seeking some sliver of redemption from a murderous past.
The 15:17 to Paris doesn’t get far into the aftermath of the train attack, which Eastwood shoots with a messy frenzy that feels truer to life than the choreographed violence of most thrillers.
He cannot speculate how
Stone, Skarlatos and Sadler will handle the fallout. He can only note that they were willing to act as instruments of the Lord’s peace and accept the cost.