AURORA | The setup for “Annihilation” isn’t breaking any new grounds. A mysterious force from perhaps another planet poses a threat to all life on Earth and it’s up to a team of scientists and soldiers to try and save the day. Raise your hands if you seen this movie before.
But in the hands of writer/director Alex Garland, whose debut “Ex Machina” was one of the best movies of 2014, what could have been standard moviegoing fare has turned into a deeply uneasy and suspenseful movie that exemplifies what people mean when they use the term “smart science fiction.”
The story revolves around Natalie Portman’s character, a biologist and former soldier, who volunteers for a secret mission into an area dubbed the Shimmer, a continuously expanding mass that’s alien in origin and threatens to consume the entire world. While for three years nothing has been able to escape the Shimmer after entering, Portman’s husband, played by Oscar Isaac, has somehow escaped and appears out of thin air, driving Portman to go into the alien land herself to find answers.
Portman’s team on this mission is populated with three-dimensional characters with personality and motivations all their own. As they delve further and further into the Shimmer, one doesn’t feel like they’re spending time with a team made up of ill defined cardboard cutouts whose only purpose is to be cannon fodder to the unseen monsters lurking in the shadows. Jennifer Jason Leigh, as the team’s de facto leader, and “Jane the Virgin” star Gina Rodriguez are standouts amongst the crew entering the Shimmer.
The film in a way feels like the sequel stylistically and thematically to “Ex Machina” for Garland. Both movies eschew hackneyed twists, gore and cheap scares and instead rely on a slow burn to gradually ratchet up the tension and entice their audiences and keep them enthralled. In “Ex Machina,” Garland explored the dark side of technology. Here, Garland has turned his eye to nature and life itself. The Shimmer consumes all life but is its essence evil or just a life form seeking to expand and grow?
Garland is a deliberate filmmaker and every shot, every camera angle, every note of the score has a purpose in building the world in which he wants us to travel in. And it’s this deliberateness that Garland uses to create so much of the movie’s tension. There’s no quick cuts, no heavy handed editing, no overly suspenseful music to cue us into the horror that could be around the corner. Instead it’s Garland’s skillful building of a world, and its subsequent destruction at his hands, that creates the horror that awaits further and further inside the Shimmer.
As “Annihilation” moves toward its ending, the answers to what is actually happening become harder and harder to find. The climax is abstract without being incomprehensible, and doesn’t rely on a last second explosion and gunfire to solve the crisis.
With “Annihilation,” Garland has created a worthy successor to “Ex Machina” a science fiction flick that is worth catching on the big screen.
4 out of 5 stars
“Annihilation” starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Oscar Isaac and Gina Rodriguez. Written and directed by Alex Garland. Based on the book “Annihilation” by Jeff VanderMeer.