A dream of a dream
Director gives memory free rein in adapting sci-fi story Annihilation
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 scientistexplorers from the book, headed up by Natalie Portman and including 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.”