The Second Coming
Back in 2015, Alex Garland stunned us all when his directorial debut, Ex Machina, turned out to the best movie of the year. What made the feat all the more impressive was that Ex Machina is about robots and artificial intelligence, a subject so utterly hacked to pieces by B sci-fi writers over the years it would require nothing less than a total demolition of our expectations to make it work.
But obliterate those expectations Garland absolutely did; we were spellbound, putty in his hands.
The notion began to take root, in the intervening years, that Garland must be some kind of genius, never mind his involvement, as screenwriter, in 2007’s Sunshine and 2012’s Dredd.
In retrospect, we would have done well to remember those missteps.
Annihilation’s premise is that the Earth has cancer...or something. A meteor strike has produced a shimmery metastasizing dome that threatens to overrun the entire world. It’s a rather grand undertaking for a filmmaker whose two major works – Ex Machina and the 1996 novel The Beach – both take place in intimate settings sealed off from the rest of the world. And unsurprisingly, the scale of the film is precisely where Garland first hits trouble.
He sequesters his dome and its military observers from the outside. There are no video conferences with the President, or shots of panic under the Eiffel Tower. In fact, despite the certainty of apocalypse, the world at large seems totally oblivious.
Still, that the entire power structure of America’s government is ignorant of the threat certainly explains why Natalie Portman, in the lead role of Lena, is tasked with saving our bacon.
Lena gets thrown into the mix when her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), a special ops guy MIA for a year, suddenly reappears in their home. The scene of this reappearance is Annihilation’s one great thrill and a rare glimpse of Garland’s talent for the uncanny. Sadly, it happens at the very beginning and the rest doesn’t measure up.
When Kane begins acting strange and vomiting blood, Lena rushes him to the hospital. But the ambulance is intercepted by what appears to be the military. She winds up at the aforementioned base where her husband is quarantined and she is left to wander and potentially spread deadly pathogens throughout the place. Oh and the men who intercepted their ambulance weren’t wearing any sort of biohazard uniforms either...whose running this show?
That would be Dr. Ventriss (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a psychologist who really might be insane. For reasons unclear, she allows Lena to join a team of three wom—er, scientists (although one says she’s a social worker), including Ventriss herself, for a journey into the dome. Faced with our incredulity at what appears to be a rather Mickey Mouse attempt at saving the world, we are told “we’ve sent in two special forces units. No one’s made it out.”
Approaching the shimmery dome, dubbed “the shimmer,” we are struck by the amateurish look of the women’s beige uniforms. So instead of elite military forces, they’re sending in the crew from 2016’s Ghostbusters? Why not tanks?
Inside the shimmer, things are, well, shimmery – think The Wizard of Oz as rendered on a PlayStation 4. And it quickly becomes apparent that a ragtag team with all the scientific acumen in the world is no match for giant alligators and shark bears. Yes. Shark bears – the discovery of which prompts to Ventriss to query, in scientific of terms, whether a shark could have had sex with a bear. Not willingly, would be our guess.
From their entry into the dome, the story becomes a kind of Aliens with an all-female cast, leading to a final act so bizarre it could be an end-of-semester project at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
And so with Annihilation director Alex Garland breaks the spell cast over us by Ex Machina. The thing is boring, garish, and ultimately pointless. By the time a twist finally arrives, we have long since lost interest. The Rotten Tomatoes score, in the 90s before the film was released, has been dropping in the days since. Though, in our estimation, it still isn’t low enough.
...Seen at the Annapolis Harbor Center