Annihilation

Annihilation is an okay sci-fi movie; it just happens to remind a viewer of other movies of the genre, mostly the Alien films, but also a touch of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Based on the first book of a trilogy that I haven't read, I have a feeling that there's much more to the story than what we see here.

The film focuses on Natalie Portman as ex-Army and a professor of biology. She's married to Oscar Isaac, who has undergone a secret mission and has been gone for a year. One day he shows up at the house, very well groomed. The reunion quickly goes haywire, though, when he starts spitting up blood.

On the way to the hospital, his ambulance is shanghaied by the military. Portman wakes up in the same facility, and a psychologist, Jennifer Jason Leigh, is free and easy with explaining that there is a large area (I think it's supposed to be Louisiana) that is been encircled by what they call the "shimmer," but looks like a huge shower curtain. Many things and people have been sent in, but nothing has come back, until Isaac.

Leigh and three others are mounting another another mission. Because she's ex-military and a biologist, Portman goes along, although it does seem odd that the others have been training for months and she just tags along. They find that mutations are rampantly growing inside, among other weird things, and it all looks like a refrigerator that hasn't been cleaned out in a while.

The story is told in flashback, as Portman is interviewed by a guy wearing a full hazmat suit. He takes precautions, but in Annihilation we have the old movie problem of stupid scientists. One of them, a brilliant physicist (Tessa Thompson), isn't so brilliant that she does reach a bare hand into water to pick up an object. They scientists have packed up a lot of stuff, but apparently no rubber gloves.

Annihilation raises a lot of questions it doesn't answer. Portman is shown lecturing about cells, and talks about they divide, which seems below college level, but what do I know. Apparently the Shimmer acts to refract DNA, whatever that means. The scientists are curious about what it all is, but we know it's alien, because at the beginning of the film it comes out of the sky, whether as a crash landing or an invasion, we're not sure.

The ending of the film is trippy, recalling the Star Child sequence of 2001, but on a much smaller scale (instead of stars, we're talking about cells). A shot of Portman's eyes at the end of the film suggests she's an unreliable narrator, but I don't know if we're getting a sequel. Based on the box office, probably not.

Annihilation does make the audacious step of having all five scientists as woman, but did get slammed for turning Portman's character from Asian to Caucasian.

I don't think I've ever commented about sound design in a film before, but here goes--Annihilation's is great. At one point the sound and the score, by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow, converge. I just wish I could have figured out what was going on.

The film was directed by Alex Garland, who directed the much better Ex Machina.