Annihilation

Annihilation (2018) is reputedly Barack Obama's favorite film produced during the last several years.  The picture has a complex and vexed history.  After being completed, the producers wanted rewrites and parts of the film re-shot -- the argument was that the picture was too cerebral and needed more action and a clearer resolution.  Director Alex Garland had "final cut" approval in this contract and so he declined to revise the film.  The producers retaliated by burying the picture -- it had a limited release and wasn't widely shown in theaters.  The movie is compelling and reasonably scary -- although I have to admit that I frighten easily.  It's fascinating throughout although grim, portentous, and fundamentally incoherent -- the film has the audacity to make its incoherence thematic:  an alien force is discombobulating nature, rewiring genes and creating nightmare hybrids -- ultimately, the survivor of encounter with the alien entity describes it as annihilating everything it encounters by scrambling the DNA in the living beings that it infects.  Thus, elements of the film that don't make much sense can be rehabilitated by being seen in the context of the fundamental disorder that the entity creates. 

Critics correctly characterize Annihilation as a sort of poor-man's Stalker -- and, indeed, the picture invokes many elements in Tarkovsky's masterpiece (a film that seems to prophecy the catastrophe at Chernobyl).  A streak of light from the heavens has crashed into a lighthouse seemingly amidst marshes next to Chesapeake Bay.  This intervention from outer space has created a zone called 'the Shimmer' by the military personnel monitoring it -- in Stalker, the affected territory was called more prosaically "The Zone."  The heroine, a doctor and medical researcher played by Natalie Portman, has lost her husband in Afghanistan or one of our other wars used as convenient plot devises in films of this kind.  During her husband's absence, the woman has engaged in a love affair with a colleague -- something that seems to haunt her.  (This aspect of the narrative is ill-conceived and doesn't fit well with the rest of the film -- I'm unclear why this plot element was introduced.)  Suddenly, the heroine (her name is Lena) discovers that her husband has returned, appearing out of nowhere, it seems, and unwilling to discuss where he has been.  Suddenly, he begins to violently hemorrhage.  On the way to the hospital, the ambulance is surrounded by black SUV's (today's equivalent of the ubiquitous "Men in Black") and Lena ends up in some kind of military compound supervised by an icy dominatrix conceived a bit like CIA chief Gina Haspel.  Her husband is dying -- his organs are shutting down.  Four women, including the base commander, have volunteered for a mission into the "Shimmer".  As it happens, the "Shimmer" is expanding and now covers a territory of many miles -- mostly forests and swamps with an evacuated village about two miles from the lighthouse that is the center of the disturbance.  Groups of soldiers have been sent into "The Shimmer" for months -- but no one, except for Lena's husband, has ever returned from within phenomenon.  (This sort of explains the man's sullen and uncommunicative manner -- but we don't know how he got out and made his way to Lena's house.)  Of course, Lena also volunteers for the sortie into the area, an incursion that is generally thought to be a suicide mission.  Each of the five women on the patrol has a backstory involving some sort of insanity or suicide or trauma -- they are all "damaged goods" otherwise why "would you volunteer for a suicide mission.'  The women enter "the Shimmer", portrayed as a zone of diffraction grating-style iridescence in the tree line.  The interior of the zone is full of strange cross-hybridized flowers and various monsters -- there is a massive crocodile, a giant lethal bear, and, in the overgrown village, strange forms of vegetation that look like human beings.  One by one, the women are killed by the monsters or simply go insane.  Lena is left alone.  She makes her way to the lighthouse where there is an anal aperture, a sort of borehole into what seems to be the intestinal belly of the beast -- the inside of the cavity is rippled with glistening black tissue and looks like the interior of the space craft in Alien.  The Shimmer creates a duplicate of Lena.  Lena is allowed out into the world where she rejoins her husband -- he's recovered apparently.  Lena and her husband embrace but their reunion is problematic because they are both aliens now, genetically unstable simulacra. 

The film is handsomely produced, although some of the effects in the Shimmer seem a little bit on the low-tech and cheap side.  The all female patrol is an interesting innovation -- a riff on the all male patrols in films like Stalker or Predator.  Everyone talks in whispers and there is scary music always playing under the action -- the scariest music is an inexplicable pop song that accompanies some early flashback scenes showing Lena and her husband in happier days. (Another inexplicable error in judgement -- the film abounds in strange cross-breeds.)  The camera tracks ominously over the disfigured landscapes full of huge bouquets of what looks like artificial flowers and the director uses jump-cuts to disorient the viewer.  When Lena is interviewed in the super-secret military-CIA compound, she is seen by one man in a Haz-Mat suit -- he is then multiplied into a number of such men and there is a weird Greek chorus kind of crowd of people outside the glass chamber where Lena is being interrogated.  The film uses other techniques from horror films including things jumping out at you from the margin of the frame and a technique in which a shot from the hero's perspective is suddenly cut to a shot from an odd, remote angle making the hero seem to be an intruder into his own solitude.  (Since Annihilation is about entities being duplicated and cloned, this kind of imagery makes thematic sense.)   There are a number of genuinely disturbing images -- walls of houses are covered with Day-glo mildew; in one instance, a carpet of mildew has grown around a corpse and created a thick gargantuan fungal torso atop which a shattered skull seems to burst upward in bas relief.   A number of other grotesque and baroque effects enliven the proceedings.  The monsters are convincingly horrible, hybrids like something from the island of Dr. Moreau.  This is an amusing picture and, certainly, intended as a sort of cerebral horror film, an objective in which it succeeds.