The new movie “Annihilation” feels like a vanity project in a very
specific way: until a few strikingly inspired moments near the end, it
plays like a film made for no personal need, no sense of inquiry or
effort to understand situations, characters, or the universe—rather, it
appears made to impress. What’s more, that strategy has, for the most
part, paid off with critics. “Annihilation” is one of the dullest shiny
objects in recent cinema, a work of a sort of bureaucratic hubris;
it’s evidence of how studio movies that escape from the longtime
critical bugbears of franchises and superheroes, and that appear to be
made for (a word that I utter with an eye-roll) “adults,” get graded
on an astonishingly generous and distorting curve.
“Annihilation” is a science-fiction movie set in a world not very
different from this one, not a dystopian future or a technological
wonderland but, rather, a current-day world that is jolted off kilter by
one peculiar event. It’s a setup that depends not on the ingenious
abstractions and artifices of a film like “Black
Panther,”
which uses the conventions of genre to create a movie driven by powerful
ideas; “Annihilation” is instead dependent on grafts—on the one big
twist inflicted on contemporary society—but it offers neither a
satisfying view of the current-day people who confront the implications
of the event nor of the society in which the thing happens. Rather,
“Annihilation” squeezes and narrows its characters and the world at
large to fit the tight confines of a plot issuing from the big deal and
turns a potentially cosmic vision of metaphysical distortion into an
unintentional comedy of self-derision.
The big event is a sharp, swift beam from outer space that pierces the
atmosphere and blasts the base of an ancient lighthouse on the barren
shore of a nature preserve. Its effects are first, albeit obliquely,
manifested through the pain of its protagonist, Lena (Natalie Portman),
a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and seven-year Army
veteran, who is in mourning for her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), who was in the military and
was reported killed in action a year ago. She’s home, renovating the
house to embark symbolically on her new life, when Kane shows up. But he doesn’t seem like himself; he’s
emotionally remote, and Lena can’t get a story out of him. Then he
collapses, bleeding.
En route to the hospital, the ambulance in which Kane is being
transported and Lena is accompanying him is waylaid by a squad of black
S.U.V.s and a batch of masked agents who purloin Kane and administer a
knockout injection to Lena, who awakens in a secret hospital-like
facility. There, she’s attended by a psychiatrist, Dr. Ventress
(Jennifer Jason Leigh), who explains that Kane is still alive; that he
was part of a mission to enter a zone, centered on the lighthouse,
that’s surrounded by a rainbow-like curtain of light called “the
Shimmer”; and that Kane is the only person who came back. He’s now lying
gravely ill in the facility, and Lena volunteers to join a new mission,
led by Ventress and including three other scientist officers, Josie
(Tessa Thompson), Anya (Gina Rodriguez), and Cass (Tuva Novotny), to
penetrate the Shimmer and investigate its mysteries.
Their mission begins innocuously enough—or, rather, it begins dully and
unimaginatively. The movie’s writer and director, Alex Garland, shows
the five women from afar, passing into the wavery Shimmer, but there’s
no experiential side to the sequence: he never shows what it’s like for
them to enter, never shows their point of view, never shows what they
see as they’re crossing through to the other side. It’s a mark of
directorial incuriosity, and it exemplifies his approach to the bulk of
the film.
The Shimmer zone is uninhabited by people, and it features some unusual
foliage, but the first sign of big trouble is an attack by a crocodile
that emerges from a pond—and turns out to harbor, shark-like, multiple rows of teeth. And that’s the trick of the Shimmer: it
“refracts,” Josie explains—it refracts genetic material and performs
splices that merge different life-forms into one. But, rather than
discovering the exotic varieties of beings inhabiting the zone all at
once, the five women advance from the lesser mysteries to the greater
ones as they get nearer and nearer to the lighthouse and its
ever-stranger recombinations—a mad bear-like creature, gut-squirming
worms—and, in so doing, they get killed off, one after another, Agatha
Christie style.
The death wish is built into the feeble, thin, and flimsy construction
of the women’s characters. The cast is happily diverse, but it offers no
diversity of experience. Nothing in the movie indicates that the
ethnicity of its characters is of any significance whatsoever to the
action. (The movie is adapted from the first book in a trilogy by Jeff
VanderMeer; it’s in the second book that Lena is revealed to be
half-Asian, half-Caucasian. Garland has said that he was adapting only the first book and never read the sequels; Portman has said that she only learned of her character’s identification while on a junket
for the film.) As the protagonist, Lena has a bit more density to her
character—the movie flashes back and forth to her interrogation,
post-mission, in a sealed glass chamber by a hazmat-suited official
(Benedict Wong), and flashes back to her affair with a medical-school
colleague named Dan (David Gyasi), but the manipulation of the time
structure, and the depiction of her memories, are slight and
inconsequential.
Besides Lena, the women are given no inner life whatsoever, with the
exception of one point of suffering each: one used to cut herself;
another is a recovering drug addict; one lost a child. And these
troubles render each, as one of them says, “damaged goods”—as if these
troubles sufficed to spur them into a virtual suicide mission. The
notion is both trivializing (of their troubles and of their mission) and
also essentially offensive. Their psychological flatness is all the
odder because one of the effects of the Shimmer is to befog the mind: as
genetic and elemental fusions take place, so does the refraction and
disintegration of the brain, and the officers on their mission begin to
feel its effects—to report them, but with no sense of
subjectivity, of eerie or dulled experience. Garland merely drops the
information in as a line of dialogue.
What’s more, the dangers and monsters that the squad faces are realized
with a ludicrous earnestness that smothers the implicit humor in the
refractions and renders the action all the sillier. One “refracted”
creature is a metallic being that resembles a human-sized Oscar
statuette, and the investigation of its qualities involves a virtual
ballet of mimicry that seems borrowed from the Marx Brothers’ mirror
scene in “Duck Soup.” It’s the second recent science-fiction movie to do
so, after last year’s
“Colossal,”
starring Anne Hathaway. The director of “Colossal,” Nacho Vigalondo,
gives Hathaway a wide margin of invention in the scenes of mimicry, and
she makes much of them, with the elements of comedy adding depth to the
drama. In “Annihilation,” Garland’s approach is exactly the opposite: he
ramps up the pseudo-mysterious seriousness, and the result is to make
the viewer laugh out loud.
On the other hand, right near the end of the film—after nearly a full
two hours—there are a couple, a literal pair, of imaginative
inspirations. Both are matters of design: a set of crystalline trees
that suggest the aesthetic exaltations of the horrors posed by the
gene-splicing space invaders, and a final conflagration of a overwrought
enormity that runs just a few moments but suggests nonetheless the
proximity of the ridiculous to the sublime. For those few moments,
Garland harked back to the low-budget, high-invention thrills of classic
science-fiction movies and did the genre itself, and its Hollywood heritage, more
honor than in the two proud hours of sententious bombast that preceded
them. At a time when many great movies of real substance and complexity
are released—few of them from the Hollywood studios—there’s little but a
nostalgia trip keeping movies such as “Annihilation” afloat on
adulation. The misplaced praise only detracts attention from, and
distorts taste regarding, the movies that are worth paying attention to,
and that may not be coming to a theatre near you.
Sourse: newyorker.com
