Review of Annihilation (2018) by Damnedthing — 20 Mar 2018

Another one of those what ifs that could have been so much better with a more experienced director. One of the problems with Garland is that he's idolised as a voice of a generation and so carries a weight of expectation on anything he puts his hand to. Along with that, there's more a hint of fawning from British reviewers - so knock at least a star off Empire and Guardian reviews.

Ex Machina was relatively tight, set in a confined space with few characters, it did pose some good questions on AI, humanity, and ego, before setting them aside to focus on manipulation and thrills.

Annihilation is broader in scope but less interesting, less well structured, and confused about what it wants to be; tonally it shifts all over the place. It begins with a meteorite hitting earth. It carries a life form that replicates and mutates across species, as well as between plant and animal. Its effects are spreading outwards from the point of impact at an increasing rate, and the edge of its area of influence can be seen as a shimmer. Teams of people have gone into the 'shimmer', but none have ever come out.

Then one man does, except there's something wrong with him: he's bleeding internally and apparently close to dying. His wife joins up with a team going into the Shimmer in order to get to the source in the hopes that she'll find something that will help.

This is all standard fare for Science Fiction - it's kind of The Andromeda Strain meets War of the Worlds meets Contact meets Alien meets Deliverance; the basic set up could be told in minutes, but it takes forever to get its arse in gear. That's a big part of the problem, the film can't decide what tone to take - it starts off as a drama, then tries to switch up gears to being an adventure into the unknown before switching gears again to survivor horror before going for something trippy.

It just doesn't gel as a whole story, it's more a collection of influences strung together in a manner that's less than the sum of its parts.

Natalie Portman does well with a character who has to be strong enough to survive but who seems too often to be asked to play her part as over-wrought. She's fearless bringing down sharkgator, but that moment is the only one where she seems in command of herself.

Jennifer Jason Leigh rasps her way through things with scene stealing disinterest, which is at least notable. Everyone else is cardboard thin so that by the time they start disappearing one by one, as people in these things are wont to do, it's impossible to care either way.

Aside from Sharkgator there's a Cowbear auditioning for a sequel to the Revenant but it fails because it makes our 13yo boy laugh - this scene goes on far too long and is so clumsily handled that any necessary tension for it to work is lost in a miasma of hohumness. There's another faux Alien bit that's supposedly gory, but again the fakery can be seen a mile off so that when things happen there's no shock or disgust. The idea of an alien virus mutating DNA is interesting, but here it's just used as background wallpaper onto which has been slapped a generic story about a group of red shirts on a mission where things go wrong and they die one by one until there's a lone survivor left. The more interesting story to me was what was happening with Oscar Isaacs character. He turns up bleeding internally on the brink of dying but somehow manages to survive for months - what happened there? Was he being studied? Did they find a 'cure'? He's obviously been quarantined so they must have done tests, even at a cellular level there must have been some discrepancies? How come neither of them turned into tree people?

There are no shocks. There's no horror. It's a bit gory in one scene. There are no thrills at all. The pacing is clunky. It looks very pretty in one or two places.

This isn't so much a deliberately slow-paced film as a low energy one consumed by indecision. Paramount dodged a bullet by Netflixing it.