**** outta *****

4 outta 5

Annihilation is a very cool, very deliberately paced sci-fi piece of weirdness by Alex Garland.  His previous film, the excellent Ex Machina, explored the rapidly shrinking line between technology and humanity.  It was basically a three person character piece where one was a robot.  Annihilation is more ambitious although not as cohesively brilliant as Ex Machina.  It definitely takes it’s time and the characters are soldiers on a mission archetypes so they’re just superficially sketched out. There are a few frustrating loose ends and a lazy pace in the early goings as the film is pretty but often ponderous. But by the end it gets incredibly strange, messy and yet horrifically beautiful in a way. 

While the camera lingering on the actor’s faces show how competent they are it’s not exactly the most enthralling stuff.  But long shots that linger on otherworldly creepiness can be pretty compelling.  And the film isn’t all long camera takes as there is some visceral monster movie stuff.  If anything, Annihilation succeeds at being very disturbing and offering up distinct visuals.  There is a wee bit of Alien here but also so many unique things here that it never feels like a rip off. 

Lena (Natalie Portman) has been waiting for a year for her missing husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), to return from a mission.  One random day he shows up weird, distant and coughing up blood.   Doctor Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) reveals that a mystical, slowly expanding energy field known as the Shimmer has taken over a piece of land.  Kane and various other teams over the years were sent in to investigate it and only he has returned.  Lena volunteers to go in along with Ventress, Anya (Gina Rodriquez), Josie (Tessa Thompson) and Cass (Tuva Novotny) to find the source of the Shimmer.  What they find inside is a world where things are merging and mutating and evidence of horrible things that happened to the people inside who either were killed by the Shimmer or went crazy and killed each other.  

Things get very abstract for most of the time.  A couple of questions, like why time passes differently in the Shimmer, go unanswered which is kind of annoying but major questions, what happened to the crew and why everything is mutated and weird, are answered in a sideways sort of way.  The movie takes a while to get to the wacky stuff as bit too much time is spent on the various back stories of the exploration crew that frankly it didn’t need because they’re all going to inevitably get picked off one by one.  Still, each character has their moment, Leigh’s Ventress is the one determined to go all the way, Rodriquez goes nuts and her final scene is gangbusters, Novotny is just sort of there but screams really good and Thompson has an incredibly eerie exit from the movie. 

Isaac isn’t in the movie much but he has a great introductory scene where he shows up and acts incredibly strange, which is made more dramatic with past scenes of him being loving with his wife.  The best stuff he does involves reveals of the incredibly disturbing craziness he and his team experienced in the Shimmer.  Probably one of the movie’s most powerful moments is simply Isaac delivering a monologue directly at the camera that is moving and chilling all at once.  Portman acts kind of sad most of the film but that fits the tone.  She has to do a lot of intense stuff and the climatic scene of her face to face with another entity is downright insane.  There is a subplot involving flashbacks to her romantic history that honestly don’t add up to much and sort of gets in the way of the craziness. 

When things get crazy is when Annihilation really sings along. The first half of the film takes it’s time and shows off the bizarre visuals of a jungle merging together with other life.  There are images of plants in the shape of people, animals who are part plant, and to keep things jumpy there’s a giant mutant alligator attack.  Often characters stumble onto the aftermath of horrible mutations like a sprawling mural of someone who is merged into a building, which recalls the discovery of the mummified Space Jockey from Alien.   Probably one of the movie’s disturbing monster related bits is when characters end up tied to a chair and then … something ends up in the room with them.  Just the look of the creature is incredibly disconcerting.  The finale is downright nuts, colourful and messy all at once as the score by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury is off kilter, atonal noise that accentuates the otherworldly visuals as the music reaches an unbearable tone for maximum impact.  Even though this is only Garland’s second film, he has the visual sense of an accomplished director. 

Annihilation is a movie that will stick long after it ends.  It shows how life evolving can be a violent, chaotic, messy process.  It’s not perfect as it takes its damn time getting to the good stuff, but when it kicks in, it’s a thrill ride.