ANNIHILATION: Alex Garland’s Ex Machina Follow-up Is A Divisive Disappointment

If the urban legend is to be believed, the fate of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was entirely within the hands of a few unsuspecting stoners who attended the last screening at an otherwise empty cinema. The film was an expensive, critically reviled flop during its initial theatrical run – and yet this one fateful screening (alluded to on the special features of the recent Blu-Ray release) was the first step towards it becoming not just a cult hit, but the biggest box office hit of 1968.

For Alex Garland, a similar fate being bestowed upon Annihilation seems likely. His film has had much more immediate critical love, but the dwindling box office means that this is a movie destined to be discovered on that modern day equivalent of the repertory cinema, Netflix. Which, in a cruel twist of fate, it will be, due to Paramount scrapping the film’s international release out of concern that it’s “too intellectual” for audiences.

A Sensory Experience? Yes. Too Intellectual? Nope.

This is patently absurd, not just because it’s depriving audiences of an “intellectual” film, but because Annihilation harks back to so many well known sci-fi efforts that it feels overly familiar to the extent that I fail to understand how anybody could have difficulty grasping it. Whereas Kubrick was derided for pushing the visual medium beyond comprehension fifty years ago, Alex Garland (who is usually a thought-provoking writer) is being celebrated for merely following in the footsteps of visionary geniuses who have come before him, with few novel ideas of his own to add to the mix.

Loosely adapted from the first instalment of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, Annihilation follows Lena (Natalie Portman), a former soldier and biologist whose husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) disappeared following a classified military mission. Without warning, he returns roughly a year after he left, but something isn’t right – moments after the two speak, he’s coughing up blood, before the government intercepts his ambulance to take him to be quarantined. Little is known about why he’s reacting this way, due to the mysterious nature of the mission he’s returned from; venturing into Area X (or “the shimmer”, as it’s more frequently referred to), an area of land that he is so far the only person to have returned from, after countless expeditions there.

After all the teams so far have been comprised of men, psychologist Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) reveals she’s putting an all female crew together to see if there’s a cure for Kane’s predicament within Area X. Lena decides to join the crew on their mission, but keeps the nature of her relationship with Kane a secret – something which fuels paranoia the deeper they get into the shimmer.

As a work of pure visual spectacle, Annihilation is a more than worthwhile addition to the sci-fi cannon. The production design of the shimmer has invited several comparisons to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a film whose influence on production design has most recently manifested in the most unexpected of places – dystopian YA adaptations ranging from Mockingjay to The Maze Runner, which have taken the otherworldly designs of “The Zone” and stripped them of their initial surreality. Here, Garland takes that influence and reapplies the lack of comprehendible logic as to how these settings have come to exist, from an unusually flooded shack, right up to a lighthouse which acts as a portal to a greater metaphysical state of being (not unlike “the room”, an area in Stalker’s Zone, which grants the wishes of anybody who steps in).

Garland also offers several effective set pieces, all of which are perfectly calibrated to confuse and crawl under your skin. The crew being stalked by a bear-like creature, whose wails sound uncannily like those of a disappeared crew member, manages to exquisitely generate tension from its surrealistic conceit, while the climactic twenty minutes in the lighthouse sees Garland attempt to explore the theme of consciousness (a conceit he’s tackled in everything from his screenplay for Never Let Me Go, to his directorial debut Ex Machina) from a different perspective. Yet for all the action Annihilation delivers, I can’t help but feel that it breaks with the source material and Garland’s previous work in its failure to offer any substantial food for thought.

Stalking STALKER

Like “The Zone” in Stalker, The Shimmer has been largely viewed as an allegory for different states of being. The most repeated of these is that the expedition is designed to be a parable for living with depression, something backed up by the otherwise unnecessary flashbacks to Lena cheating on her husband, punishing herself as she attempts to find a cure to make him better. I would also argue that the shimmer is designed as an allegory for a disease that causes mental degeneration; the fact that the crew keep forgetting important events, and crew members keep disappearing without any conventional forewarning, puts us in the uncertain headspace of somebody suffering from an illness like Alzheimer’s, for example.

And yet these weighty themes don’t manifest themselves organically, with the characters drawn in a manner that makes viewing the film as either of the above allegories a trying exercise. Garland has returned to the theme of identity repeatedly, always offering something profound and depressingly existential to say in a variety of different genres – and manages to achieve the difficult task of making his characters’ discussions of said themes feel natural.

But here, the characters seldom discuss the thematic obsessions integral to Garland’s body of work and leave it for the overly familiar story to do the heavy lifting, leading them to become every bit as disposable as the heroines in a run of the mill horror movie. This is especially bizarre considering the professions of the characters; they are unanimously intelligent, but are written with such little semblance of personality, it undercuts any aspirations to using them as the mouthpieces for an existentialist discussion.

It’s not that Garland isn’t allowed to write films divorced of his usual themes – he did pen the screenplay for 2012’s mindlessly enjoyable Dredd reboot, after all. It’s just that the film feels so unusually empty; even if he has subtly snuck his usual hallmarks into the mechanics of the narrative itself, he’s populated the foreground with characters who never come alive as anything more than archetypes, who trade in so much exposition it’s hard to see how any audience member could be overwhelmed with confusion at the story being told.

Annihilation: Conclusion

Annihilation is a disappointing follow-up to Ex Machina, which managed to probe at humanity’s current existential crisis with artificial intelligence, while also functioning as a terrific psychological thriller. Annihilation does offer enough surreal horror within its visual spectacle to make it worth recommending to sci-fi fans, but for all the different interpretations the film is being afforded by other writers, I can’t help but feel that it is fairly empty thematically.

Annihilation is best viewed as a trip deep into an otherworldly house of horrors, offering a deliberately illogical twist on the formula of horror movie storytelling – because when assessed as a science fiction movie, its lack of weighty ideas makes it pale in comparison to both its influences and Garland’s prior work.

Annihilation is proving to be a divisive film – which side of the fence do you fall on?

Annihilation is out now in the USA, and will be available to stream on Netflix internationally from Monday, 12th March.