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Not Quite Horror Or Science Fiction, 'Annihilation' Struggles With Its Story

EPK.TV

As names of movie monsters go, The Shimmer doesn’t have quite the pizzazz of handles like King Kong, Godzilla or The Mummy, and it doesn’t even match up to the blandly named The Thing or Them, which at least imply a note of fear.

But The Shimmer might make you think of a dance or at worst a creepy thug in a film noir from the early 1950s. The Shimmer in Annihilation has no personality, and not even a clear shape. It’s something like a rather colorful miasma that’s taken over a large beach area with a lighthouse, and as a knowing official says early in the movie, it’s getting bigger.

A few groups of men have gone into The Shimmer, and no one has returned, so some wise soul gets it into his or her head to send in a team of women. One of them is Lena (Natalie Portman).

Writer and director Alex Garland builds the film around an interrogation of Lena – so you know that whatever was going on she’s still alive, although she looks a bit beat up. She’s dressed in white and she sits on a chair in a room with glass walls.

The questions come from a man in a white hazmat suit and clear mask. Outside the glass, people watch and listen. The man asks his questions slowly and deliberately, and Lena responds quietly. Annihilation may be the least anxiety-ridden monster film I’ve seen.

Lena teaches biology at Johns Hopkins University, and to hint at what’s coming, she shows her students cancer cells as they divide and grow into tumors. Lena’s mostly downcast and lonely. She begs off a dinner invitation from a colleague who tells her that all work and no play will do her no good. Her husband, a soldier who goes off on dangerous, secret missions, is missing. Guess where he’s been.

Lena’s comrades are equally accomplished women, including a doctor, a physicist and an anthropologist, and armed like commandos they head off into the lightly swirling filaments of pink and green. On the inside, The Shimmer, has the tropical strangeness you find in films like King Kong or The Lost World.

The four make their way through outsized palms and ferns, so the riotous green landscape feels more like an assault than a paradise. And as you’d expect, huge beasties leap out and wreak havoc on the wary yet intrepid women.

The physicist figures out the weird science of life inside The Shimmer. It’s an explanation that makes little sense to me — something about everything in the place being refracted back onto itself — but no matter; it’s enough to tell us that things are bad and dangerous, and these heroic four had better save humanity.

There’s not much unusual in Annihilation, until near the end. Lena finds herself inside the lighthouse at the center of The Shimmer in the presence of a metallic-looking humanoid. It’s lean and softly muscled but has no facial features and no sexual markings.

It begins to mirror all of Lena’s moves – when she tries to fight, it replicates her actions; when she runs, it runs with her; or when she simply moves across the space, the creature mimics her. It’s a dance, and it’s an exquisite dance. It’s eerie; it’s thrilling, and somehow, as these two figures undulate around the screen, it feels as if something in the movie has just been completed with a neat little slurp. The dance feels utterly right for the film, yet it makes you wonder what is being tied up so beautifully.

I have no answer for that. Until this dance, Annihilation seems typical, with a bit more swirling color than horror films typically emit. But Annihilation isn’t quite either a horror film or science fiction, although it has both elements. The dance suggests that the movie may have found its ending, but it may not yet have its beginning or its middle.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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