Annihilation--An extraterrestrial object crashes next to a lighthouse on a remote coastline. This gives rise to a slowly spreading zone with a border of eerie prismatic light referred to, by the government researchers who work on the edge of the evacuated area, as "The Shimmer." Military expeditions are sent into The Shimmer, but nobody comes back out.
We learn all this along with Lena (Natalie Portman), an ex-military biologist. Six months earlier her soldier husband (Oscar Isaac) left on a covert mission. She hasn't seen or heard from him since, and assumes he's dead. Then one evening, just as she's in the therapeutic act of re-painting the bedroom, in walks Isaac, handsome as ever but somehow different--quiet, blank, uncommunicative. Shortly thereafter he falls deathly ill, and he and Lena are both whisked off to the secret facility just outside The Shimmer. When Lena learns that a new expedition into the zone is soon to leave, she volunteers to go along.
That's the set-up for this sci-f thriller directed by Alex Garland, based on a novel by James VanderMeer, and it's intriguing enough that you stay with the movie for a long time. Lena's comrades (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny and Tessa Thompson) are all women, all intellectual and/or physical badasses, and each with some tragedy in their pasts. Beyond the border of The Shimmer, they find a realm of mutant plants and animals, souped-up versions of familiar species. Some are beautiful and some hideous and lethal, but these external menaces turn out be the least of their worries.
The story echoes ideas and motifs from Lem's Solaris to Carpenter's The Thing to Attack of the Crab Monsters, among others. It's gripping for most of its length, but I wanted to like it better. The tone is somber to the point of pretentiousness, with muted light and murmured dialogue, like a sci-fi flick by Harold Pinter. The monster-picture scare scenes are crudely effective, but there's also a lot of gore that's fairly unpleasant, and the Ligeti-like electronic music is headache-inducing.
Then, after three acts of rising tension and curiosity, the climatic scenes give us a blow-out of (very good) special effects. But the revelations, to the extent that they're made clear at all, are nothing we couldn't have guessed. It's sort of underwhelming.
If I were a more rigorous Freudian I might point out the juxtaposition of the phallic earthly lighthouse with the alien orifice from which the invading presence issues. I might make note of the horror of the male characters at the prospect of life and movement inside their bodies, or of the general atmosphere of gloom and dread that hangs over this story of distaff orientation, written and directed by men.
But I'm not that rigorous a Freudian. So I'll just say that Annihilation is three-quarters of an excellent sci-fi picture, but in the end it loses its shimmer.
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