The new movie “Annihilation” feels like a vanity project in a very specific way: until a few strikingly inspired moments near the end, it plays like a film made for no personal need, no sense of inquiry or effort to understand situations, characters, or the universe—rather, it appears made to impress. What’s more, that strategy has, for the most part, paid off with critics. “Annihilation” is one of the dullest shiny objects in recent cinema, a work of a sort of bureaucratic hubris; it’s evidence of how studio movies that escape from the longtime critical bugbears of franchises and superheroes, and that appear to be made for (a word that I utter with an eye-roll) “adults,” get graded on an astonishingly generous and distorting curve.
“Annihilation” is a science-fiction movie set in a world not very different from this one, not a dystopian future or a technological wonderland but, rather, a current-day world that is jolted off kilter by one peculiar event. It’s a setup that depends not on the ingenious abstractions and artifices of a film like “Black Panther,” which uses the conventions of genre to create a movie driven by powerful ideas; “Annihilation” is instead dependent on grafts—on the one big twist inflicted on contemporary society—but it offers neither a satisfying view of the current-day people who confront the implications of the event nor of the society in which the thing happens. Rather, “Annihilation” squeezes and narrows its characters and the world at large to fit the tight confines of a plot issuing from the big deal and turns a potentially cosmic vision of metaphysical distortion into an unintentional comedy of self-derision.
The big event is a sharp, swift beam from outer space that pierces the atmosphere and blasts the base of an ancient lighthouse on the barren shore of a nature preserve. Its effects are first, albeit obliquely, manifested through the pain of its protagonist, Lena (Natalie Portman), a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and seven-year Army veteran, who is in mourning for her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), who was in the military and was reported killed in action a year ago. She’s home, renovating the house to embark symbolically on her new life, when Kane shows up. But he doesn’t seem like himself; he’s emotionally remote, and Lena can’t get a story out of him. Then he collapses, bleeding.
En route to the hospital, the ambulance in which Kane is being transported and Lena is accompanying him is waylaid by a squad of black S.U.V.s and a batch of masked agents who purloin Kane and administer a knockout injection to Lena, who awakens in a secret hospital-like facility. There, she’s attended by a psychiatrist, Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who explains that Kane is still alive; that he was part of a mission to enter a zone, centered on the lighthouse, that’s surrounded by a rainbow-like curtain of light called “the Shimmer”; and that Kane is the only person who came back. He’s now lying gravely ill in the facility, and Lena volunteers to join a new mission, led by Ventress and including three other scientist officers, Josie (Tessa Thompson), Anya (Gina Rodriguez), and Cass (Tuva Novotny), to penetrate the Shimmer and investigate its mysteries.
Their mission begins innocuously enough—or, rather, it begins dully and unimaginatively. The movie’s writer and director, Alex Garland, shows the five women from afar, passing into the wavery Shimmer, but there’s no experiential side to the sequence: he never shows what it’s like for them to enter, never shows their point of view, never shows what they see as they’re crossing through to the other side. It’s a mark of directorial incuriosity, and it exemplifies his approach to the bulk of the film.
The Shimmer zone is uninhabited by people, and it features some unusual foliage, but the first sign of big trouble is an attack by a crocodile that emerges from a pond—and turns out to harbor, shark-like, multiple rows of teeth. And that’s the trick of the Shimmer: it “refracts,” Josie explains—it refracts genetic material and performs splices that merge different life-forms into one. But, rather than discovering the exotic varieties of beings inhabiting the zone all at once, the five women advance from the lesser mysteries to the greater ones as they get nearer and nearer to the lighthouse and its ever-stranger recombinations—a mad bear-like creature, gut-squirming worms—and, in so doing, they get killed off, one after another, Agatha Christie style.
The death wish is built into the feeble, thin, and flimsy construction of the women’s characters. The cast is happily diverse, but it offers no diversity of experience. Nothing in the movie indicates that the ethnicity of its characters is of any significance whatsoever to the action. (The movie is adapted from the first book in a trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer; it’s in the second book that Lena is revealed to be half-Asian, half-Caucasian. Garland has said that he was adapting only the first book and never read the sequels; Portman has said that she only learned of her character’s identification while on a junket for the film.) As the protagonist, Lena has a bit more density to her character—the movie flashes back and forth to her interrogation, post-mission, in a sealed glass chamber by a hazmat-suited official (Benedict Wong), and flashes back to her affair with a medical-school colleague named Dan (David Gyasi), but the manipulation of the time structure, and the depiction of her memories, are slight and inconsequential.
Besides Lena, the women are given no inner life whatsoever, with the exception of one point of suffering each: one used to cut herself; another is a recovering drug addict; one lost a child. And these troubles render each, as one of them says, “damaged goods”—as if these troubles sufficed to spur them into a virtual suicide mission. The notion is both trivializing (of their troubles and of their mission) and also essentially offensive. Their psychological flatness is all the odder because one of the effects of the Shimmer is to befog the mind: as genetic and elemental fusions take place, so does the refraction and disintegration of the brain, and the officers on their mission begin to feel its effects—to report them, but with no sense of subjectivity, of eerie or dulled experience. Garland merely drops the information in as a line of dialogue.
What’s more, the dangers and monsters that the squad faces are realized with a ludicrous earnestness that smothers the implicit humor in the refractions and renders the action all the sillier. One “refracted” creature is a metallic being that resembles a human-sized Oscar statuette, and the investigation of its qualities involves a virtual ballet of mimicry that seems borrowed from the Marx Brothers’ mirror scene in “Duck Soup.” It’s the second recent science-fiction movie to do so, after last year’s “Colossal,” starring Anne Hathaway. The director of “Colossal,” Nacho Vigalondo, gives Hathaway a wide margin of invention in the scenes of mimicry, and she makes much of them, with the elements of comedy adding depth to the drama. In “Annihilation,” Garland’s approach is exactly the opposite: he ramps up the pseudo-mysterious seriousness, and the result is to make the viewer laugh out loud.
On the other hand, right near the end of the film—after nearly a full two hours—there are a couple, a literal pair, of imaginative inspirations. Both are matters of design: a set of crystalline trees that suggest the aesthetic exaltations of the horrors posed by the gene-splicing space invaders, and a final conflagration of a overwrought enormity that runs just a few moments but suggests nonetheless the proximity of the ridiculous to the sublime. For those few moments, Garland harked back to the low-budget, high-invention thrills of classic science-fiction movies and did the genre itself, and its Hollywood heritage, more honor than in the two proud hours of sententious bombast that preceded them. At a time when many great movies of real substance and complexity are released—few of them from the Hollywood studios—there’s little but a nostalgia trip keeping movies such as “Annihilation” afloat on adulation. The misplaced praise only detracts attention from, and distorts taste regarding, the movies that are worth paying attention to, and that may not be coming to a theatre near you.
