Annihilation

UK Release Date. 12 March 2018
Certification. 15 
Running Time. 1 hour 55 mins
Director. Alex Garland
Cast. Oscar Isaac, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tuva Novotny, Natalie Portman, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Benedict Wong.
Rating. 66%

Review.

Following on from a confident directorial debut, writer and director, Alex Garland released Annihilation, a thrilling, surrealist science fiction adventure. Intense and intelligent, Annihilation is perhaps less accessible than his debut offering, Ex Machina.

Annihilation is a visually dazzling production. Especially the fantastical, primordial Shimmer - a giant, glowing, kaleidoscopic wall. There is an entrancing beauty, and hallucinatory melancholy, to the Shimmer. For years, apparently, military expeditions have ventured into the Shimmer, and for years, no communication has been recorded and no one has returned.

Natalie Portman plays Lena, a cellular biologist and former soldier. Portman deliberately underplays the role with reserve and a cerebral steeliness. Her dogged, no-nonsense determination (with glimpses of a conflicted past) allows Portman to fashion an authentic, believable, well-developed, human protagonist in a world that is literally annihilating humanity at the cellular level. 

Unfortunately, the supporting cast does not benefit nearly so much from Garland's script, which is adapted from a Jeff Vandermeer novel of the same name. The under-developed, all-female expedition members are largely stereotypical tropes - a single-minded authoritarian figure, Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is set to lead the team comprising of a physicist, Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson), an anthropologist, Cass Sheppard (Tuva Novotny) and a paramedic, Anya Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez). The result is that the characters lack the feminist potency the source material implies.

The strength of Annihilation is the mission itself. Once the members of the expedition venture into the Shimmer, Annihilation comes into its own. Garland creates a sense of peril through disorientation and an increasingly menacing slow reveal. This is not a distant alien planet in a galaxy far, far away. This is Earth. Present day. 

But ultimately, there's an inherent problem with mission films like Annihilation - in that the journey is almost always more interesting (and engaging) than the final destination.

Indulgent to some, the film's esoteric last act alone is intentionally challenging and will almost certainly divide an audience. For me, the director leaves too much open for discussion at the conclusion.

As a result, Annihilation may not work consistently as well as it could. But it is a daring production, and one that is sure to provoke debate for a long time to come. The film may be viewed as an introspective character study, and by extension, an exploration of the self-destructive impulses in humans, and by further extrapolation, what it means to be human.