Annihilation

One of the things we have lost in the streaming wars is an opportunity for spectacle. Oh, it still happens now and again, but mostly, if it’s not a blockbuster, it’s not going to have the opportunity to be seen on the big screen. Especially, sigh, if the movie is led by women. Now, part of why this movie got shuffled mostly onto streaming is that it’s long and dense and talky and so forth. But I can’t help thinking that the assumption was that Natalie Portman wasn’t enough to get butts in seats.

At the time the movie was optioned, the book was still unpublished. Annihilation is told in first person, and no character in it ever gets a name. The main character is referred to only as the biologist. She is a member of a four-person team going into a place only known as Area X. The other three are a psychologist, a surveyor, and an anthropologist. A linguist was supposed to be part of the group but chose not to go at the last minute. The four, all women, have spent months training, including essentially leaving behind their entire personalities. They are supposed to be investigating exactly what is happening there; twelve expeditions have gone before them and all have failed. Most never came back; the few who have are also now dead.

In the movie, she is Lena (Portman), a biologist at Johns Hopkins. Her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), has been gone for a year and is generally presumed dead. Then, he returns. Only he starts hemorrhaging. As they are on their way to the hospital, a military strike force stops the ambulance and they are taken into a kind of custody. They are brought to a complex near something called the Shimmer, which the movie says is outside Area X but which is not referred to as such by most of the characters. Lena meets Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a psychologist. She also finds out that Anya Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez), Cass Shepherd (Tuva Novotny), and Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson), along with Ventress, will be going in. She agrees to join them in the hopes of saving Kane’s life.

What Area X is like varies pretty seriously between book and movie, but in both cases, it is both familiar and alien. It is never fully clarified in the book; in the movie, it is apparently explicitly St. Marks Wildlife Refuge, the inspiration of the ecosystems of the book. In the book, the biologist gives us great detail, noting details that would catch the eye of someone whose expertise is in ecology. However, Lena is an expert in cell development and is initially seen teaching about what are not named as HeLa cells but are HeLa cells. It is she who explains to the others that what they are seeing is mutation.

Alex Garland explicitly did not reread the book before making the movie. He wanted it to be a dream of the book, and it does have that feel. Plot details feel half-remembered. In the movie, we initially have five women; in addition to the biologist and the psychologist, we have a paramedic (the husband’s job in the book), a geomorphologist, and a physicist, respectively. Since the characters are seldom seen actually doing their jobs, it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine simply having forgotten what jobs anyone had and, say, knowing there’s a paramedic in there somewhere.

Mostly I do not vibe with Alex Garland movies. I found Ex Machina disturbingly sexist, and most of the others have no particular interest for me. I found this one unsettling, but of course it’s supposed to be. The filming is impressive, and it’s strangely beautiful. There are images from it that linger. After it ended, Peacock tried to throw me into a different movie, and I had to tell it to let the credits play so that I could absorb what I had seen and listen to the score, by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, to process. Even if it’s a dream of Jeff VanderMeer’s book, it’s enough of a reflection of it to be worth the experience.

As for the book, well, I’ll have to read the other two now. It’s apparently later revealed that the ethnicities of the biologist and the psychologist are not what they are in the film, but the characters get no physical description and almost no personal information in the first book, the only one that had been written at that point. There is more world to explore, and the book left me wanting to explore it.

Next month, we’ll be exploring not just strange worlds but sexuality with Desert Hearts.