Annihilation (2018) - Movie Review

 

Watching Alex Garland’s evolution as a creative mind over the last two decades has proven quite fascinating, to the point where ‘evolution’ is the most apt way of describing his trajectory. Starting as a novelist, providing source material for one of Danny Boyle’s most underrated films with The Beach, he went on to collaborate with Boyle more directly, writing the scripts for some of his more widely-celebrated ventures like 28 Days Later. Then he set out to bring his own scripts to life with Ex Machina, one of the strongest sci-fi offerings of the last handful of years.

But this film, Annihilation, is the final test. He’s proven that he can write for multiple media forms, from novels to screenplays to video games, and he’s proven that he’s capable of visual storytelling on top of that. Now, it’s time to see if he can turn the work of someone else, in this case being Jeff VanderMeer’s novel of the same name, into a story that still carries his fingerprint.

Well, on the surface, that is certainly what we get. Backed by a very talented cast, Garland’s penchant for irrevocably humanistic writing holds firm here. Smart, strong, capable and tremendously likeable, these characters serve as a solid grounding for what turn out to be extraordinarily heavy examinations on the nature of humanity.

Winding biological fundamentals and theological musings together like nucleic acids strands, the story looks at the all-too-human habit of self-destruction in its various forms, from social to biological to metaphysical. Using the division of cells as startling visual shorthand, we are shown what drives people to seek that annihilation of self, the innate compulsion to do so on a molecular level that only echoes outward, to the point where what is destroyed and what is left over start to eerily resemble each other.

Add to that the psychology of the characters we follow, all of whom show signs of some form of self-harm whether it’s the body or the mind that’s hurting itself and the things they do either heal it or just deal with the damage. As abstract as this film can get in a lot of areas, to the point where I get the feeling this is a film I’ll be mentally decoding for a while even after writing this review, this marks a high point in Garland’s empathetic mode of storytelling. It shows a level of compassion for man’s own shortcomings that casts no true judgement on what they do because it knows full well that this is the kind of damage that is hard to fix. And even harder to come to terms with.

But the true finesse behind this film isn’t in the writing; rather, it’s with how this marks that Kill Bill moment for Alex Garland in how he has turned into a full-fledged, visual storyteller. We’re past the point of scriptsploitation that populated his debut; here, it is a genuine marvel of the visual medium. Building on the conditions found inside ‘The Shimmer’, which is like the Zone from Tarkovsky’s Stalker while you’re off your face on mushrooms, the combination of all forms of life refracted within results in some truly beautiful imagery. Trees that have grown into human body shapes, crystal structures winding up out of the sand, hunters that make for some of the creepiest creatures captured on-screen all year; this is stunning in all respects, not to mention downright psychedelic the further we delve into the heart of this celestial madness.

This is basically the perfect kind of cerebral sci-fi: Made to be enjoyed in the moment as the audience basks in its beauty, but also made to be discussed after the fact as its numerous musings unravel within the mind. Alex Garland officially enters the canon of genre filmmakers to keep a seriously close eye on, proving without a shadow of a doubt that he can hold his own alongside the greats.