Annihilation

What do you get when you cross writer/director Alex Garland with producer Scott Rudin and a facile read of Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy?

When Kane (Oscar Isaac) goes AWOL from an exploratory mission of strange phenomena in Area X and inexplicably re-appears at his home, his ex-military wife, Lena (Natalie Portman), scrutinizes how exactly he got there—he is not himself.  Before we have a chance to invest ourselves in the principals, Kane and Lena are moved to a nondescript interrogation facility at Area X.  There Lena meets Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who ponderously exposits on the previous teams of men sent into a region called The Shimmer.  While inside, radio contact is lost, the teams fail to return and are presumed dead.

Serendipitously, Lena, whose husband was the only survivor of the prior teams, left the military to become an expert in cellular biology.  So, at 36, she spent 4 years minimum in the military, 7-10 years in school, and then another 10 to 20 years becoming a published expert in cell biology?  She must have gone through the same accelerated learning program as Amy Adams in ARRIVAL, starting from the day she was born.  It’s almost as if female characters in Hollywood are cast too young and/or poorly written.

Once more unto the breach ventures Dr. Ventress’ team—Anya, a paramedic (Gina Rodriguez), Josie, a physicist (Tessa Thompson), and Cass, an anthropologist (Tuva Novotny).  Something of an enigma, Dr. Ventress’ numbness stems from more than guilt.  Once inside The Shimmer, their initial encounters are genuinely terrifying—in particular, one which I can only describe as a nightmare twist on South Park’s ManBearPig.  These scenes work as vignettes but Garland doesn’t seem to know what else to do with them.

The shimmer acts as some kind of prism which refracts everything.  Insofar as Garland skimmed the Cliffs Notes version of Gould and Eldredge’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, the biological distortions appear to be cross-mutations of homeobox (“hox”) genes.  Hox genes were found to be interchangeable in various species, giving evidence of the points at which their common ancestor diverged.  Garland invokes this to impart some kind of authenticity to the science of the movie, but gets it, and the history of cellular evolution, so wrong that he wastes screen time setting up logic that is discarded anyway.

I don’t expect science fiction to always be grounded in fact, which is challenging to do, but you can’t have your cake and eat it.  I never complained that the aliens in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS might not know what sound is if they don’t have an atmosphere in which to propagate it.  Garland would have done well sticking with either fantasy or sci-fi, but half-assed both.

In ARRIVAL, at least the entities had some kind of endgame.  It is explained away here that the aliens who caused The Shimmer may not even be sentient.  Yet rather than expanding upon accelerated natural selection as an indiscriminate process, the narrative reverses course toward a denouement that is sentient, purposeful, superfluous, and, in the final shot, entirely predictable.

Capping off the faux profundity, there’s always a camcorder exactly where you need exposition.  Strangely, the camera in question survives an explosion that, when repeated, engulfs a structure which makes you wonder why it didn’t the first time.

Ultimately, Garland cops out and what started as a fascinating science fiction like Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, pregnant with possibilities, plays out as FRIDAY THE 13th meets PREDATOR, where Dutch is a Final Girl with a Ph.D. and Jason Voorhees is a blooming fungus.