Beauty, Terror, and Making Sense of Annihilation

(BIG Spoilers for the movie obviously.)

Annihilation is a SciFi film that is as terrifying as it is beautiful. The film is something along the lines of Andrei Tarkovsky meets John Carpenter - The Thing meets Solaris*. It has all the trappings of a B-horror movie complete with expendable cast members and freaky monsters. But then it evolves into this surreal avant-garde showstopper of a finale. The movie has a folksy acoustic guitar soundtrack that slowly mutates into a bellowing synth nightmare. What you're left with is not the movie you started with. Annihilation is the kind of experience that shoves your brain into a blender and asks you to pull your mind back together again. It's weird on an awesome scale.

But what is Annihilation? That's... gonna take some writing. I can tell you up front that I love this movie. 2018 is still fairly young, but this is probably Movie of the Year already. However, I would not fault you for missing the message or maybe concluding that there isn't one at all. Annihilation doesn't have a villain with a goal or much of a shape. And unlike most SciFi films it doesn't have an easy morale like "robot slavery is bad" or "global warming will kill your children". Even a few critics like Inkoo Kang of Slate seemed totally lost at the end of Annihilation. She dismissed it as "just a mindscrew". Well, I think it's quite a bit more than mindscrew for mindscrew's own sake.

I imagine in a few decades, Annihilation is going to be one of those "pet theory" movies. The Shining is probably the best example of that kind of thing, as seen in the bizarre documentary, Room 234. The Shining is basically just a haunted hotel movie set around a badly dysfunctional family. But throw in some Stanley Kubrick touches and some details that don't add up and then you have legions of fans obsessing over it, seeing everything and anything. The Shining could be about Indian genocide or faking the Moon Landing or a really great flapjack recipe. Annihilation once its been dissected can also be about anything you want. The question is, what do I see in it?

Shining and Shimmering

Like The Shining, Annihilation is a uniquely hypnotizing film. They're both slowly-paced nightmares, and both are broken up into chapters by title cards. Details don't all make sense either. There's an infinity symbol tattoo in Annihilation that inconsistently appears on three characters. In The Shining, we are told the previous caretaker was a "Charles Grady" who murdered his family, but later Jack Nicholson meets the menacing ghost of "Delbert Grady". Now does the name inconsistency mean that Kubrick was leaving an Easter Egg for the perfect flapjack recipe? I doubt it.

A lot of conclusions about Annihilation will be what you brought in. If you're a cancer survivor, you'll see a movie about cancer. If you're depressed, you'll see a movie about self-destruction. If your marriage is failing you'll find a movie about a couple torn apart and pulled back together again. If all you wanted was a damn good horror movie with the scariest best bear attack in film history, you'll get that. Or if you're confused, you could decide that director Alex Garland had nothing to say and the Annihilation was stupid. The movie reflects your own preconceptions, which is appropriate considering what this movie is about an alien entity made up of reflections.

The "alien entity" in Annihilation actually is much like the evil Overlook Hotel in The Shining, in that both are "built" out of their victims. The Overlook can summon ghosts and bad memories, but it has no form of its own, needing Jack Torrence to do the actual stabbing. Annihilation's alien distorts and refracts everything that comes into it. It seems to give the characters of this film what they were looking for. The ones afraid to die are killed, the one who wanted to face the alien got to meet it in the most horrible way, and Tessa Thompson's character lets herself dissolve into it. Only Lena (Natalie Portman), actually had a goal outside so got to go home.

The alien entity either inhabits or metaphysically is a piece of territory in Florida that has been locked out from the outside world. People in the film call it "The Shimmer" based on the greasy way it plays with light, reflecting it back into you. The Shimmer's main power is biology, mutating everything that comes inside. It creates horrors but it also creates wonders. Biology even without an alien twisting it is beautiful, it is the awesome power that created us. But biology is terrifying too, creating cancers and genetic dead-ends and madness. The Shimmer is that power magnified and hyper-charged. It will take whatever you give it and create something new. Whether that "something new" is beautiful or terrifying depends on where you're standing.

Lena, Kane, and the Shimmer

However, again, what does all this mean? This is all cool and creepy, but what does it all add up to? Well, to get to that answer, we need to talk about the central relationship in this film. We need to look at the the romance between our two leads... and their romance with the Shimmer.

One of the brilliant things Annihilation does is set up the relationship between Lena and her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac). It is presented to us as flashbacks cut in and out of the main narrative. We first see a tender and loving scene, but then slowly the flashbacks grow colder and more distant. What's really clever is that the film isn't cutting between huge swaths of time, all these flashbacks take place during the course of just a few hours, the day right before Kane left to investigate the Shimmer. This probably isn't the first break in this relationship, I get the sense it has broken before and come back together again. Something was clearly wrong if Lena needed to jump on her asshole coworker's dick.

Lena and Kane's love is not what saves the world in Annihilation. True love is only a special transcendent superpower in cornball stories (oh, and Interstellar). Instead the world is saved by this toxic relationship. Our heroine doesn't step into the Shimmer out of affection but out of guilt. "I owed him" is Lena's only explanation for her actions. Those are not the words of a happy wife.

There is, of course, a third party in this relationship now, and that's the Shimmer. The Shimmer is given no identity of its own. It has no name, it has no discernible goal, and it has no face. We don't know why the Shimmer came to Earth, if it came to Earth on purpose, or what it was trying to do. All we can see is what it does, and that's reflect what it takes in. Its actions seem like a foreign entity trying to communicate in the only way it can: by echoing what it hears. This alien is lot like the Scub Coral from Eureka Seven's backstory, actually. The Coralians could only interact with other beings through a process of fusion. To the outsider, this is a disgusting menace that devours everything in its path. But to the Scub, they're just trying to say "hello"**. In Annihilation, the Shimmer is an alien that is truly weird. We don't understand it, and it understands us even less.

The Shimmer doesn't fully grasp what a human is, but it imitates Kane the best it can. The alien in Annihilation is like the audience, slowly discovering who the lead characters are. At the beginning of the film the Shimmer doesn't really know Kane or Lena. The thing that appears in Lena's house is a half-finished creature. It can't explain itself and it doesn't work as a human. Its organs are failing. This is a failed experiment like all the other disturbing things inside the Shimmer. But we shouldn't be surprised that the alien can't become human. It has only seen half the story.

When Lena enters the Shimmer, the alien continues its natural process of echoing, creating a Lena Doppelganger just like it created a Kane Doppelganger. This time, Lena "tricks" the alien into holding onto a white phosphorus grenade and exploding itself. I notice however the alien humanoid is at first unharmed by the grenade, simply holding onto the flames, confused by what they are. It looks down at Kane and suddenly it understands something. It "learns" how to die. Then the Shimmer is destroyed.

Certainly the Shimmer has observed death before. It definitely saw it when two of the five women in this film were killed by that scary as shit monster bear. But death had no real significance to the alien. It was an abstract natural process like every other process the Shimmer had been randomly mixing together. It watched Oscar Isaac's character immolate himself like a Buddhist monk with clinical disinterest. "Huh, these Earth-creatures do that too, let me put that in my notes." However, the Doppleganger at the end was staring down at Kane's death now from Lena's perspective, it now knew what this action of suicide meant. And as it copies everything else, it copied suicide too.

The Shimmer by this point is as caught up as the audience is with Lena and Kane's story. It literally has been Kane and now literally has been Lena. This lifeform is everything both of them ever were and, if you wanna be cynical, perhaps these two people suck so badly that their utter toxicity killed this noble creature. But if you want to look it a bit more positively, the Shimmer as Kane was finally complete.

Any person alone is an unfinished perspective. You won't know Eric Fuchs just by jumping inside Eric Fuchs' skin. My opinion of myself is horribly twisted, I wouldn't judge me based on my view of me. You need to also know the people around them to really have a proper three-dimensional human. The Shimmer couldn't know Kane just by being Kane, it needed to be Lena too. Once the alien managed to see the entire story, its Doppelganger on the outside was able to live. This Kane-like being had a finished identity or at least a finished purpose that could survive. The rest of the Shimmer was a failed experiment, and it had no reason to exist.

Where We End and the Alien Begins

In the end though, how different are we from the Shimmer? It's a creature following random impulses to imitate, that seems bizarre and beyond us. But how conscious are our actions anyway? Lena never seemed to have wanted to betray Kane. She was driven by broken impulses to bang her asshole coworker (and I really need to repeat what a fucking asshole that guy was). Gina Rodriguez' character makes up a long line of rationales for her crazy behavior when she ties up the other characters. But we can see that logic has nothing to do with it. It's just an instinctual fight or flight response that's fired the wrong way. Even Jennifer Jason Leigh's character acts like a dispassionate scientist yet she's driven by a terminal cancer. Literally her biology is deciding her actions.

All humans are basically piles of evolution and instinct that have been randomly assembled by mutations and natural selection into the forms we have now. Our impulses, our mistakes, our failures - they're decided partially or even fully on a subconscious level by cobwebs of wiring in our brains. And because we're in those brains, we are incapable of understanding what's really going on inside them. We have to spend all day with the persona we've created for ourselves and yet can you really explain everything you do?

Why did this post take a week to write? Well, it was hard, but I still got most of it done in a few hours. Why did I procrastinate and avoid finishing this? I couldn't tell you, I don't understand my own psychology let alone anybody else's. We're all fumbling in the dark, succeeding sometimes, failing other times. (This isn't an excuse, nihilistic philosophies won't keep your lights on, and they definitely won't get your Annihilation pieces written either.) You can choose to see us as big greasy sacks of meat that somehow manage to keep a civilization going. That view is terrifying. But I'd say there's some beauty in that too. We are such strange creatures and yet we create morality, inspiration, sanity, justice, faith, and, yes, love if I must be cheesy. And we create works of art like Annihilation, which, I may have mentioned before, is really really really good.

Annihilation ends with Lena hugging Kane's Doppelganger. Both of their eyes are - to be cute - shimmering. They are both the same kind of new life form. Does this mean Lena's story was a lie, that she is an imitation too?

I say it doesn't matter. Lena has clearly been changed by her experience inside the Shimmer. She is not the same person as she left. But even without distortions and mutations, no good story ends with the character the same as when they started. If she wasn't a new woman at least philosophically, this movie would suck. Lena and Kane were already flawed and broken before they left. If this Lena and Kane are just a flawed copy of a flawed original, what's really is the difference? That difference doens't matter. What matters is what they do next.

Really, it is the only choice they have left: to embrace. Lena, Kane, and the parts of the Shimmer they carried home with them have each other, once again. Where they end and the alien begins is not important, only the moment, only the emotion is important.

That is beautiful, I suppose. And also terrifying.

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* Or The Thing meets Stalker, but I never saw Stalker. Sorry. Feel free to dismiss the 2,000 or so words that follow because I'm not enough of a film nerd.

** Any movie that can lead me off on a Eureka Seven tangent is worth seeing.