Annihilation (2018)

Rewatched 3/18/24 (Pluto TV)

This one more than any other cinematic exploration of an extraterrestrial environment shows the horror in how badly we would flounder if truly given access to such a thing. Despite our most brilliant minds—biologists, psychologists, all of the other ologists we have—there are almost certainly things out there that, if we ever come into contact with, we will fail to understand, no matter how much education or military training we have. To personify the brain and brawn at the disposal of world governments is a glaringly simple but effectively frustrating constant in Garland’s screenplay as the group of scientist soldiers makes its way through The Shimmer (one of the more beautiful low-fi landscapes of 21st-Century cinema) with every footstep more desperate and eventually hopeless than the last.

The plot’s evolution pits them against science and violence, and neither the scientist nor the warrior in any of the characters can solve the far-too-advanced problems set before them. They’re out of their league and it becomes increasingly clear to us long before Lena finally realizes it in the film’s final moments—her counterparts never did as they were so easily dismantled and disoriented by this organism that was simply in its infancy, not even in a later evolution. We see its childlike confrontation in the lighthouse and it’s finally at its clearest to us that even in this early stage, The Shimmer and its inhabitants defy all logic we have known. 

That Garland is able to so confidently realize this world, to me, makes up for almost all of the awkwardness of the story’s anomalous, alienating developments. It’s a strange, distinctive tale that isn’t afraid to go for uncommercial questions and challenging answers that often approach and nominally achieve pretension. Kinda surprised I like this as much as I do.

8/10