Film Review: <em>Annihilation</em>
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When you read a book as weird as Annihilation (and it’s sequels in the Southern Reach trilogy), the impression of the weirdness and messiness stays with you. From the minute the adaptation for this was announced and the knowledge that Alex Garland, who dazzled us with Ex Machina two years ago, meant that I would be in for an experience with this film, whether good or bad. Unfortunately for me, it was more bad than good.
It’s very hard for me to divorce my feelings of reading those books from this review or even when I was watching the movie, but I shall endeavor to do so. In order to do that, I’m going to get into spoilers. You’ve been warned.
I think as an adaptation of the book, the film is…fine. Alex Garland has the right as the adapter to pick and choose which elements from the books that he wants. Considering the fact that the books are so weird and apparently Paramount had zero desire to make sequels, this seems like a decent version of the film. Also, Garland himself mentioned that he only read the book once and then wrote an impression of the novel. Gone is the well, the crawler, the notebooks, the lighthouse owner, I mean he jettisoned like 60% of the plot. That in itself is not bad, though it made for a very weird watch cause I was wondering how it would resolve given what we weren’t seeing.
The problem is that Alex Garland feels the need to fill in the spaces from the omissions with stuff that is absolutely irrelevant to driving the narrative forward. This mainly falls on the numerous flashbacks with Oscar Issac‘s character Kane, no doubt a role beefed up to lure a star of his caliber. Annihilation decides that it needs to have a driving motivation for Kane’s character going on the mission, and that motivation is he’s found out about his wife’s affair. This is not only incredibly silly but it works against all that the movie wants to do with its other flashbacks to Kane and Lena (Natalie Portman). Much like with Gravity, we didn’t need extra emotional stakes. Annihilation, the film, works when it’s letting you wade in the weirdness that is Area X or in the excellent performances of Tessa Thompson and Gina Rodriguez.
Furthermore, the framing device of this film, the interview with Lena, grinds the movie to halt on many occasions. We don’t need characters to comment on what we have just seen or relay what we are about to see. The framing device doesn’t even work for the way he really wants it to, revealing that the Lena we’re listening to isn’t the same Lena we met before the shimmer. I enjoyed finding out that revel, but in having her already be free of Area X, the movie loses some much needed suspense heading into the climax.
However, even with all of that messiness, the final minute of this film is sheer perfection. Garland blends scifi and human emotion in a way I long to see. It’s just a shame the lead up to it was so foolish.
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