‘Annihilation’: An ambitious, if odd, journey
MOVIE REVIEW
A too-real robot freaked us all out in
Ex Machina. That’s nothing, though, compared to the unnerving and completely rad wildlife in Annihilation, filmmaker Alex Garland’s follow-up.
Based on the first novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, the striking sci-fi thriller ( eeeg; rated R; in theaters nationwide Friday) is a beautiful and brutal head trip exploring the positives and negatives inherent in mankind’s evolution, with characters struggling against losing themselves to something alien. On one hand, it’s a brainy take on horror tropes, and on the other it’s an empowering female-led mystery with an underlying roller coaster of weird leaving nightmares in its wake.
Natalie Portman is mostly serious stoicism as Lena, a biologist and ex-soldier who assumes her Army husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), is dead after having been missing for a year. Then one night he shows up, clearly not his old self, and she learns the truth: Her spouse is the sole survivor of a mission to explore a strange area of Florida swampland surrounded by a mysterious otherworldly swath called the Shimmer.
To help fix whatever’s wrong with her hubby, Lena volunteers to be part of a new expedition to ground zero of the strangeness. Alongside leader Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), paramedic Anya (Gina Rodriguez), physicist Josie (Tessa Thompson) and anthropologist Cass (Tuva Novotny), Lena ventures beyond the border into an exotic landscape where science has gone sideways, and plants and animals alike have been affected down to their very genes.
Garland’s plot is relentless with its terror and deep immersion in a familiar world that has been tweaked into something else altogether. The cast is solid, especially the core group of actresses — Rodriguez, especially, is noteworthy as a complicated butt-kicker who’s a welcome departure from her good-girl
character on TV’s Jane the Virgin.
The women who wander into the Shimmer — chosen because earlier, failed expeditions had been made up solely of men — are all broken in some way, and their quest is a therapy session of sorts that unveils emotional and physical wounds. They provide the emotional center in this scientifically bonkers scenario, and while the movie doesn’t make a big deal of it, a band of capable scientists who happen to be women is a welcome sight in the mostly male-dominated genre.
With his debut Ex Machina, an extraordinary study of artificial intelligence and human fallacy, Garland showed potential as a sci-fi visionary, and he takes his next step with Annihilation. Some moviegoers will dig its audacity; others may find it the craziest flick since mother! It’s a bizarre tale that will leave heads spinning about what exactly just happened but still finds a way to be genuinely satisfying.