[5.4/10] The benefit of the cinematic form is that it’s malleable. A great movie can be a self-serious naturalistic drama or a zany, loosely-plotted comedy. It can have a tight three act structure or it can have a messy spillover of events that fit a different tone. You can do a million things with two-hours of screen time in a million different ways, and as a reviewer, I try to keep myself open and generous to the new and different ways inventive auteurs find to take advantage of the medium.
But the problem with Annihilation is that the things it's good at -- its visuals and its final, captivating sequence -- feel disconnected from the ways in which it is a movie. If you stripped this film for parts and just extracted certain images or scenes, you would find compelling bits and pieces. And yet, as an all-encompassing piece of art meant to tell a story, meant to introduce characters, meant to make you care about what’s going on from the first minute to the last, it falls woefully short.
The film tells the story of Lena, an ex-soldier/biologist who ventures into a mysterious zone called “The Shimmer” to try to find out what happened to her dying husband. She teams up with four other scientist/soldiers to investigate the bizarre happenings inside, where no communications can reach the outside world and from which no one has ever returned. The expedition goes predictably awry quickly, with Lena and her crew finding signs of other failed attempts while they try to make sense of the unknown phenomena all around them.
The result comes off like a Predator clone as presented by David Lynch. That description may sound exciting, or at least interesting, but the truth is that for it’s first hundred minutes or so, Annihilation is a remarkably boring film given its premise. Generic military types with barely-sketched personalities wander anonymously through the jungle where little of substance happens between the occasional, solid set piece. Director Alex Garland can’t spice up his standard issue, Star Trek-esque “hey, there’s some freaky stuff going down on that planet” narrative with anything approaching real character or intrigue. It leaves the whole exercise feeling like an hour and a half of treading water to justify the film’s grand, final showpiece.
That showpiece is a doozy. If you lopped off just “The Lighthouse” segment of the movie, apart from the doldrums of the setup and the ponderousness of the frame story, it would be an incredible short film. The demoscene-esque symmetry and variation of the energy blob that Lena confronts, the Del Toro-esque figure who consumes her teammate and withstands her bullets, the mirroring alien creature that moves just so and eventually erupts into a singular immolation, all grab the viewer’s attention and evince a mood and a vision that are abstract, palpable, and transcendent, but all but missing elsewhere in the film.
The worst part of the whole endeavor is the dialogue. There’s a thudding quality to almost every exchange, where people declare exactly what they’re thinking, robotically convey some exposition that’s already obvious to anyone with a brain, or speak in bland action movie clichés. There’s always some artifice to movie dialogue, but holy hell, nobody in the world talks like this. I initially wanted to attribute it to the stupefying effects of The Shimmer, but the truth is that everyone in the movie speaks in the same awkward, stilted rhythms regardless of where they’re in the alien zone or not. The merits of this film are far and away on the visual side, and it seems like the verbal side was massively neglected by comparison.
The runner up in that department is the characters. No individual’s personality is depicted through action, everyone’s backstory is just announced, either by another character or through the patently unnecessary frame narrative. But hey, that’s OK, because everyone is a flat, stock archetype anyway, whom you’ll forget as soon as they’re picked off or disappear or get transmogrified into something else. Even Lena, who should be compelling given her losses and purpose, is a weird blank space in the middle of the film, barely defined despite being the nominal driver of the action.
That action, thankfully, isn’t bad. Apart from that impressive final sequence, the only thing to really recommend Annihilation is its production design and aesthetic, with remixed flora and fauna that stand out amid the film’s otherwise soporific qualities. True to a film starring Natalie Portman, there’s a bit of a Star Wars prequel vibe to some of the CGI, but most of it is forgivable, and when the lights go low and the digital seams don’t show, the film’s capable of some real terror and awe.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for its mystery and themes. It becomes clear what’s going on within The Shimmer fairly quickly -- that whatever this entity is has been remixing and mashing up the various inputs its found on our planet is. But that doesn't stop our heroes from wandering around and puzzling over it for god knows how long. By the same token, the film tries to connect everything to a grand theme of unconscious self-destruction being our downfall, cellularly and socially, rather than external malady or directive choice. But while it’s an interesting idea, it’s lost in a sea of tepid scenes and tin-eared dialogue trying to dramatize it.
That’s the overarching problem with Annihilation. It fails at the things that you need to sustain a film: character, story, theme, pacing, dialogue, intrigue. But it succeeds at the things that could exist apart from the structure and be just as good, namely the raw imagery of the piece and the almost baletic, psychedelic sequence at the end which the audience only vaguely needs the backstory provided to appreciate. There’s things worth salvaging from this film -- bravado sequences that almost justify the experience -- but they come apart from, or at the expense of, the things essential to the form.
Annihilation is an interesting, occasionally astounding art project, but it’s not much of a movie.
A loved it so much. So funny and sick. The end was so interesting.
