Annihilation
The book Annihilation, written by Jeff VanderMeer and published in 2014, is a genre-bending page-turner of the sci-fi variety, so it’s no surprise that genre-bending filmmaker Alex Garland brought it to the big screen. Both are weirdly fantastic.
The movie perfectly captures the tone of the book, even if the specific plot points are very different; “inspired by the book” might be the best descriptor. Without giving away spoilers, the movie follows Natalie Portman’s character Lena, a biologist and former military, as she participates in a science expedition into a strange environmental anomaly, called The Shimmer, taking over a portion of Florida. Her husband was part of a previous expedition, and he has now returned home not quite himself and with a strange illness, so Lena’s motivations are conflicted from the start.
That’s essentially the plot of the book too, although the details are very different. Those differences are inconsequential in my mind, and I recommend choosing to experience the book and the movie as two separate pieces of art. I read the book quickly—it really is a page-turner—but when I was done, I had a hard time retelling the details of the narrative arc to friends. I was more interested in the emotion of the book and imagining the fantastical world of The Shimmer VanderMeer had created.
Creating the world of Annihilation is one of the ways in which the movie shines. It looks absolutely incredible, and I mean that both in our modern colloquialism that it looks great and that it also looks, by definition, “impossible to believe.” There is a richness to the color that I didn’t imagine, and the movie is better for it. The barrier into The Shimmer is beautiful and foreboding, and once the characters are in that world, everything has a strange light to it, almost as if you’re seeing an overexposed photograph.
Within The Shimmer there are biological mutations nearly everywhere you look. In the book, the scientists pass through a long-abandoned town and shapes of people (are they the people themselves?) remain frozen in twig and flower form. It was a lingering and haunting image from the book, and the movie produces it perfectly.
The cast of the movie is effortlessly diverse, and the performances are strong. Just as in the book, this particular expedition is made up entirely of women, so it’s fascinating to watch the characters as individuals, not having to serve as a token female in a story. Gina Rodriguez (Jane the Virgin) and Tess Thompson (Creed, Thor: Ragnorak, and Westworld, to name a few) both play characters wildly different from those they’re known for, and they both seamlessly inhabit these personas. Not once did I think of previous performances when they were on the screen. Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh both give strong performances as well although their relationship in the book is a plot line I missed in the movie. In the book, their contentious interactions are laced with distrust. But the size of the cast and time constraints of a movie don’t allow for that nuance to develop. The character Lena, known only as “the biologist” in the book, is the unreliable narrator of that story, which creates an intimacy between her and the reader that is also missing from the movie, and I think it suffers a little from that lack of emotional focus.
Thompson and Rodriquez during filming on set.
The movie is open-ended in its interpretation, or lack thereof, of the events that take place, but it is arguably a complete story. The book, on the other hand, is the first of a trilogy and ends with more questions.
Annihilation isn’t for everyone. If you like your plotlines neatly tied up then both the movie and the book will drive you crazy. But if you enjoy thinking outside the confines of known science and are comfortable with unanswered questions, you will appreciate both. Director Garland was a well-known writer (including writing the screenplay for one of my favorite sci-fi movies Sunshine) before his directorial debut with 2014’s award-winning Ex Machina. Book author VanderMeer is part of the “New Weird” genre (he even edited an anthology of New Weird short stories with his wife, Ann), and his other books are highly acclaimed. I’m looking forward to seeing what both have to offer next.
Annihilation is the first book in The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, available from Amazon and other retailers.
If you’re interested in reading more in the New Weird genre, Book Riot makes some solid recommendations.
Photos of The Shimmer and the flower corpses are stills from the trailer (Paramount Pictures). Image of Tessa Thompson and Gina Rodriguez is from Rodriguez’s Instagram.
