Spiritual message underlines sci-fi adventure
Sometimes cinematic adaptations are conversations with source material rather than direct representations.
No recent film more exemplifies this idea than Alex Garland’s bold, metaphysical and just plain weird “Annihilation,” adapted from Jeff VanderMeer’s book, the first in his “Southern Reach” trilogy.
The result is a deeply challenging, big-budget, female-driven sciencefiction film, which begs a question:
Films as singularly adventurous as this don’t come around often.
VanderMeer’s book is obtuse, meditative, mysterious and transfixing. It suggests and hints at possibilities that are far greater and wilder than the characters encounter in the plot, requiring the reader to make those connections, to fill gaps.
Garland, who adapted the screenplay, takes the premise, characters and larger ideas of VanderMeer’s book and interprets them in his own story to bring an almost unfilmable novel to the big screen as a sci-fi epic.
“Annihilation” follows a
group of female scientists who set out on what is essentially a suicide mission to a top-secret location known as Area X, where a shimmering energetic border has appeared, cordoning off an amorphous portion of wilderness, changing its landscape. There is no communication in or out; in three years, no missions have returned.
Natalie Portman stars as Lena, a biologist, professor and former soldier. Her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), went missing in Area X for a year before he returned — changed and subdued — and became violently ill. She joins the latest mission hoping to search for whatever might have changed him, for the traces of him he left behind.
Her group includes medic Anya (Gina Rodriguez), physicist Josie (Tessa Thompson), geothermal scientist Cass (Tuva Novotny) and a taciturn psychologist, Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh). They’re going to enter “the Shimmer,” go to the lighthouse, collect data and return (although that seems unlikely, based on the track record).
What happens in the Shimmer is where Garland diverges from VanderMeer’s tale. Time and space tilt once they enter. They find a stunningly beautiful, vibrant, dripping rainforest swamp overflowing with bright flowers and fungi. Hazy light pierces, signaling always the presence of the lighthouse. But it seems to alter time, too.
The women lose whole days of memory, and the wildlife is increasingly intoxicating, dangerous and threatening. Great beasts leap out of the dark, their roars carrying a distinct human tone. The group finds remnants of old missions and harrowing videotapes.
Always the question remains:
This basic question returns again and again, providing the foundation for the themes of existential paranoia that Garland dives into during the last act of the film. The title refers to total destruction, but what’s happening is more transformation and mutation.
Garland splays these big ideas brazenly, grounding them in Portman’s performance as grieving widow, curious scientist and fierce warrior. She must confront the memory of her husband repeatedly as she traces his journey through steps that have fragmented, rooted and rotted.
She digs and delves inside to find an answer, discovering that the only way through lies within.
That larger message is what Garland eventually unearths, giving a distinctly spiritual slant to the sciencefiction story.