ALIEN ENCOUNTER
‘Annihilation’ takes sci-fi thriller on murky path
An alien invasion tale recalling the work of J.G. Ballard and Stephen King, “Annihilation” tells the story of a small group of female soldier-scientists who enter a zone taken over by “the Shimmer,” a glowing area that is growing, causing mutations and “duplicates” and threatening to engulf the world.
Based on the award-winning “Southern Reach” trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, the film is a conceptual thumbsucker with the same mix of chronological mush and murky personal history that we found in the 2016 box-office hit “Arrival,” a film I did not admire much.
Adapted and directed by Alex
Garland (“Ex Machina”), “Annihilation” features Oscar-winner and Harvard graduate Natalie Portman (“Black Swan”) as Johns Hopkins biologist and Army veteran Lena. In opening scenes, Lena, who is dressed in hospital patient garb and in a glass cell, is debriefed by a man (Benedict Wong) in a hazmat suit.
In flashbacks, we learn that Lena’s husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), a secret military operative, had been missing for months and presumed dead after being sent on a classified mission within the Shimmer and that Lena has been living in seclusion.
In emotionally fraught scenes, Kane appears out of the blue in the home he shares with Lena, although he repeatedly says, “I don’t know,” to Lena’s questions.
For reasons not altogether clear, which could be this film’s alternate title, Lena later joins the all-female team bearing assault rifles, although not helmets. They enter the Shimmer to get to the lighthouse (shades of Virginia Woolf) where it all started to find out what happened and maybe stop it. No one has returned from previous missions. For reasons that make little sense, another alternate title, the group includes Lena’s new psychologist, the mysterious Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh). The other members of the expedition are gay, former addict Anya (Gina Rodriguez), Cass (Tuva Novotny), a vet with a dead daughter, and a communications expert named Josie (Tessa Thompson).
At an eerily deserted army base in the Shimmer, the women find traces of the group Kane had been with earlier, including scary footage and a dead body that has come apart and bloomed like a fungus, an image reminiscent of Rob Bottin’s designs for John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”
“Annihilation” has a few spooky moments. But it is one of those films that asks you to bring more to it than it brings to you, and I am afraid all I brought was a notebook and bottled water. “Annihilation” has met with accusations of “whitewashing” because the character Portman plays is later revealed to be of Asian descent. But the problem with “Annihilation” is not race. The arbitrary nature of the storytelling and the repeated use of Crosby, Still & Nash standard “Helplessly Hoping” give the film a shaggy dog quality. Is it a Chernobyl metaphor?
“Annihilation,” which perhaps should have been called “The Shimmer,” also borrows from H.R. Giger’s groundbreaking designs for the original “Alien” and Andrei Tarkovsky’s conceptually similar 1979 effort “Stalker.” To that list, Garland has added a work that is 115 minutes of confusing deja vu.