"You really have no idea what it was. "

The movie adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's 2014 novel Annihilation represents a very specific area of science fiction storytelling:  the alien enigma.  Very few of those stories end with a resolution to the central mystery, and Annihilation is not an exception to the rule.

It's been described as a combination of Contact, Arrival and The Fountain, but none of those references really touch the core of the movie.  For a better cinematic starting point in the challenges of comprehending the unknown, I'd suggest 2001, the 2010 guerilla film Monsters*, or either of the movie adaptations of Solaris, Stanislau Lem's classic SF novel.

As in those films, the unknown in Annihilation remains just that: unknown.  The mystery is never solved or understood, and we are left to judge it only by its ambiguous effects on those who have attempted to explore it.

At the core of Annihilation is the Shimmer, a zone of anomalous effects that surrounds the impact point of a meteorite at a lighthouse on the Florida coastline.  The slowly expanding Shimmer has defied analysis, and no one has returned from any of the attempts to explore it.

This changes at the start of the film with the unexpected reappearance of one of the mission members: Sergeant Kane, the husband of cellular biologist Lena, played by Natalie Portman.  Kane, who has been missing for a year, is disoriented and suffering from some kind of physical trauma when he returns to their home.

Taken into custody by the government on their way to the hospital, Kane and Lena are transferred to Area X, the research base for examining the phenomenon, where Lena decides to join the next group of explorers to enter the Shimmer as Kane slowly deteriorates in quarantine.

Annihilation's disjointed, staccato pacing only emphasizes the strangeness of the environment that the five-woman team of scientists ventures into.  This small group of interlopers offers a full spectrum of responses to the strangeness of the Shimmer and its disconcerting effects on their minds and bodies: confrontation, defiance, curiousity, acceptance, and fear, as demonstrated through strong performances by the excellent ensemble cast of Jennifer Jason Leigh, Portman, Tuva Novotny, Tessa Thompson, and Gina Rodriguez.

My main criticism of the film is that it doesn't go far enough in its evocation of the alien - I expected it to be far more extreme in its depiction of the oddities created by the Shimmer.  Only during the final scenes at the impact point of the meteorite does the movie attempt to fully reach into the bizarre possibilities of alien existence.

 

It's hard to say whether Annihilation succeeds or not - that would depend entirely on what you think it's trying to do.  It's deliberately non-linear, ambiguous and open ended, and as such it falls well outside of the standard approach to storytelling.  It may be that its success lies in exactly that, its lack of answers to the questions it raises.

- Sid

* In which the Mexican/US border is defended by a massive wall, in case you were wondering where Donald Trump gets his ideas.