No doubt this is a metaphor. Or a simile. Or maybe a silly. Your view, your call.
It was about time for another semi-serious alien invasion movie, and Annihilation (2018), for lack of a more plausible interpretation, will have to fill the bill. Told in a non-linear fashion, and admirably parsimonious with critical information, Earth is being invaded – for lack of a better word – by something called the Shimmer, at an undescribed part of coastal America where a piece of space rock has impacted a lighthouse. The area has been evacuated, optics are a little screwy, and anyone who goes in does not come out.
Until Sgt Kane, effectively lobotomized, pops up literally out of nowhere at his own house, frightening his wife, Lena.
Soon Lena is at the forward security post of the Shimmer, examining the phenomenon from afar. It’s growing in area, which alarms everyone. She falls in with a psychologist, a physicist, a geomorphologist, and a paramedic, all women, and Lena herself is ex-military and a PhD biologist. They are all members of the group selected for the next expedition into the mystery. Within days they’re off.
Where they immediately lose a couple of days without noticing it. Why?
And are attacked by a giant mutant alligator. Amazed by giant mutant flowers. Bemused by giant mutant lichen –
Oh, sorry. But it’s true.
Soon they discover gruesome evidence of previous military missions into the Shimmer, body parts and memory sticks and, well, less common articles. But things start coming together when the giant mutant bear kills one of the women and begins screaming for help … in her voice.
Soon, the difference between invader and defender is blurring, and whether that person on the medical gurney is a person or not is problematic.
But there are problems with this story. Why send in a woman-only team? Must they all have some burden to bear? I mean, I understand this makes them expendable, but it also may damage their will to survive and reach their goal, no? And where the hell is the military, anyways? They hardly show their faces, and yet national security is their primary responsibility. The presentation doesn’t make sense.
Worse yet, these women are supposedly strong, highly educated and trained women, but that education, with the exception of Lena, is not a big part of the story; indeed, their screaming has a bigger part than their training. Their leader, the psychologist, is more like a pro-forma chaperone at a hormone laden school dance, off with her own agenda concerning the cute science teacher, rather than keeping the teenagers from getting into trouble. Why would the military assign such an uninterested leader?
In the end, while this should feel like an intense exploration of an utterly alien race akin to the exploration in Arrival (2017), of the difficulties of understanding the motivations of a species which lack even a common ancestor, it looked more like someone had come up with a lot of really cool CGI effects, hired Natalie Portman to emote all over the place, put it on film and called it a movie. Many of the visuals border on the fantastic, some of the bones of this story are good, such as letting information out slowly and teasingly, but others are little more than the fragile flowers that litter the sets, and consequently Annihilation tends to tilt at the worst of times.
