Action and suspense, but there’s no drama
Not even Natalie Portman can pull audience into distorted reality
If you’ve ever had a visual migraine, you know what it’s like: There’s a prism in the visual field that distorts everything. Now imagine that prism as something enormous, covering a wide swath of land. And then imagine it being possible to walk into that prism, into that separate world within a world. In the movie “Annihilation,” that prism is called the “shimmer,” and no one knows where it came from. However, it’s certain that it’s getting bigger, and that does not bode well. “Annihilation” is an attempt to make a thinking-person’s sci-fi movie, and director Alex Garland (“Ex Machina”), in adapting the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, has created a sober movie full of interesting ideas. But he neglected to remember that thinking people also like a little drama with their science fiction. On that score, “Annihilation” comes up short.
This is not to say that the movie lacks incident. There’s action and suspense, and there are eerie moments. But “Annihilation” fails to do the essential thing. It fails to motivate the central characters.
Much of the film, for example, involves people going on an expedition into the shimmer, which could easily turn out to be a suicide mission. Yet, not one of them has an active motive for doing so. No one has fire and purpose and a reason to risk everything. Instead it’s just people stumbling into things, either because they’re depressed, or they feel they have nothing to lose, or they’re doing as they’ve been told.
It’s just dull to watch characters that, at most, care no more about what they’re doing than you do — and that’s true even if one of them is played by Natalie Portman and another is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Monsters could be eating their friends. The fate of human civilization could be in their hands. If they don’t have a strong desire to overcome obstacles and accomplish something, the movie is reduced to just a bunch of stuff happening.
“Annihilation” starts well. Natalie Portman is a biology professor at Johns Hopkins University, whose soldier husband (Oscar Isaac) disappeared a year ago while on a secret mission. She remains grief stricken; and then one night, he reappears, but it’s no joyful reunion. He can tell her nothing of where he’s been, and it soon becomes clear that he’s seriously ill. Soon, they’re both in a military hospital, where one of the doctors, a military psychiatrist played by Leigh, tells the professor all about the shimmer.
Any movie that gives Jennifer Jason Leigh a major role in which she gets to act spooky and weird can’t be all bad. “Annihilation” is also, rather in passing, a women’s war movie, in that the psychiatrist leads a team of uniformed women into the shimmer. That’s something, too. But these are the kinds of things you have to think about to appreciate. “Annihilation” leaves audiences with plenty of time to think — about their taxes, about what to eat when the movie is over, etc. — because it’s so uninvolving.
Or you might think this, that the shimmer world represents the unconscious, the place of no rules, terror, and infinite possibility. “Annihilation” indulges in too much grotesque gore (when even I’m averting my eyes, after all I’ve sat through, that tells you something). But there are simpler nightmare moments, as when Portman finds herself in a room she can’t escape, that are haunting.
But no, “Annihilation” really isn’t worth seeing. Still, if you meet someone who has seen it, have them tell you the good parts.