Annihilation

It’s difficult to know what to make of Annihilation (2018; dir. Alex Garland), based on the Jeff VanderMeer Southern Reach Trilogy novels.  It’s visually striking and intelligent.  It’s fun to watch.  Throughout the mood is muted and somber, and the pace is relatively slow.  When a meteor strikes near a lighthouse on the Florida Gulf coast, a slowly expanding area (“the Shimmer”) begins to grow around it.  The government begins sending in teams to investigate, but none of them return.  The main character is Lena, a genetic biologist whose husband has been missing for a year after going on one of the missions to the Shimmer.  He suddenly reappears in her kitchen in a dazed state, unable to remember much of what he has been doing.  He becomes critically ill and on the way to the hospital government black-ops take them both into custody.  The government has been sending mission after mission into the Shimmer and all have disappeared. (It seems odd that the government would do this, sending mission after mission, sacrificing numerous men, but maybe this is the way of government.) Lena joins the next expedition, an all-woman team, that goes into the shimmer.  She hopes to find a way to save her husband and to explain what happened to him.

In the Shimmer, rules of logic break down.  Strangely mutated animals appear.  One by one various crew members are killed or disappear.  Lena deduces that in the Shimmer genetic material is passing back and forth among different organisms, and she realizes that this is happening to her.  When she manages to escape the Shimmer (we don’t know how she does this), she recounts her experiences to investigators.

Well, obviously, the Shimmer is the result of an alien presence.  (The scientists claim not to be sure what it is at first, though there’s no question about it from the start). Scientists are not sure the presence is even aware of the humans.  But everywhere the Shimmer touches, organisms transform. In the film a domestic sub-plot involving marital problems of Lena and her husband.

Like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Annihilation contemplates the implications of aliens on the earth.  It does so by showing rather than by explaining.  We don’t ever see the aliens, only the effects of their presence.  We don’t know anything about their intentions.  We know only that they have arrived.  In 2001 and Close Encounters encourage us to deduce or infer explanations for the alien presences.  They may remain mysterious, especially in 2001, but at least there is an underlying logic to their presence.  In Annihilation we know nothing.  As an alternative to exposition and explanation, Annihilation shows: and it does so impressively.  The mutated animals, the shimmering translucence that encloses the Shimmer, other aspects of the alien presence.  In the penultimate scenes, we see protracted sequences in which new beings, doppelgangers of the main characters, are created using genetic materials from humans and (we assume) the aliens.  Again, though these scenes themselves are dramatic and visually interesting, we don’t exactly know what’s happening or why.  These scenes in particular are not satisfying.  They are climactic moments of digital special effects, but what do they signify? Are the aliens of the Shimmer going to create new humans that replace the old, as in the various Invasion of the Bodysnatchers films? Are they accelerating the process of evolution, as in 2001? These films hint at explanations without spelling them out.  Annihilation is less revealing. In fact, inscrutability seems to be its method.

The aliens are doing whatever they’re doing.  Annihilation remains intelligent, tantalizing, inscrutable, and incoherent.

United in a government hospital, Lena and Kane gaze at each other.  This exchange occurs:

Lena: You aren't Kane... are you?

Kane: I don't think so.

[pause]

Kane: Are you Lena?

Are the original Kane and Lena intact, infused with new genetic materials that will advance or destroy the human race? Are they replacements for the originals? We don’t know.