Film review: ‘Annihilation’

“The movie is stunning and strange, an adventure we rarely get to take in contemporary cinema....”|

One Paramount studios financier of Alex Garland’s new picture “Annihilation” called the film “too intellectual” and “too complicated.” We can be grateful that he did not have final cut, because the movie is stunning and strange, an adventure we rarely get to take in contemporary cinema.

The film calls to mind a quote from the documentary “Hearts of Darkness,” in which Francis Ford Coppola reports that on the set of “Apocalypse Now,” “Little by little we went insane.” That process happens much faster in “Annihilation.”

The film begins with a radiant comet from deep space striking a lighthouse somewhere on Earth. Around the lighthouse grows a permeable barrier that is called the Shimmer - it is rainbowed like a blown bubble or a puddle of oil on water. The humans in the area seem to think that, if the weather is fine, they can reach the lighthouse and capture its mysterious power source, but the weather is rarely fine - from the edge of the Shimmer comes a sound like thunder.

A paramilitary force sets a perimeter around what they call Area X, a no man’s land in the bayou. The problem with the Shimmer is that anything can go through it but nothing returns. Except, it seems, for Lena (Natalie Portman), whose flashback answers to a fully hazmatted scientist called Lomax (Benedict Wong) and serves as the story of “Annihilation.”

Before her time through the looking glass, Lena was a cancer researcher and former member of the armed forces - she’s comfortable with a microscope or a machine gun. She’s curious to know what happened to her husband (Oscar Isaac), a soldier on a secret mission in the Shimmer who never came back or, more accurately, came back as a shell of a himself, coughing blood.

The powers that be are tired of sending teams of men through the Shimmer trying to find something to kill, so they try out an all-female search party. Besides Lena, there’s the adventurous Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a psychologist and expedition leader. She’s fervent to reach the center of the riddle, to see that which has not been seen before - she’s a seeker not unlike Percy Fawcett in the excellent book and movie “The Lost City of Z.” Their fellow travelers include Anya (Gina Rodriguez), a brash paramedic, Josie (Tessa Thompson), a quiet physicist, and Cass (Tuva Novotny), a savvy anthropologist.

Crossing into Area X, into pure science fiction, Lena and Co. learn immediately that they’ll have to work with no compass, no communications and no coordinates. They are afflicted by killer flora and fauna and sometimes, killer fauna with flora. All cellular organisms within the Shimmer are stuck in continuous mutation across species, across kingdoms of life - see the dappled deer with lovely pink blossoms on their antlers. Time jumps, relationships twist and we catch many tricky little details - just try to keep track of the tattoos on everyone’s forearms, for instance. The central question becomes less “What is generating the Shimmer?” than “Why have these people volunteered for a surefire suicide mission?”

The women suffer hallucinations (or are they shared dreams?) - they sleep in a pile, finding around them and within them, “duplicates of form, echoes,” from the predatory mutations within their brave new world, where DNA is active, refracted at incredible speed.

A character says in wonder, “My mind is cut loose,” so that ours may be too. Thanks to the director Garland and visual effects supervisor Andrew Whitehurst, the extraordinary ending of “Annihilation” is more trippy than terrifying, though there are a few moments that might slide nicely into your nightmares. Leaving the theater, your eyes might involuntarily seek in the landscape the waving rainbow edges of the Shimmer.

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