ANNIHILATION isn't long enugh.

Rating: 5/10 (19 March 2018)

At least half of the films I see need cutting. Most film stories can be told in two hours or less; this one can't. I haven't read the novel; I didn't know that it is the first of a trilogy. But it's not just a matter of restoring fifteen minutes of cuts. I'm guessing that the missing material isn't on the cutting room floor; I'm fairly confident that it was never filmed - or even screen-written - in the first place. The science - reference to which is fleeting - is barely exposed. And yet it is at the heart of the mystery of the film. The character development is spotty, leaving it mostly to what they say about themselves; this is almost never complete enough, always unreliable. Lena does divine their truths, or at least enough of it to get by on, but although it seems to satisfy her, it does not satisfy the film. Too many loose ends - or worse, too many surprises. Shock value may be horror film fodder, but this film aspires to greater things which it should have achieved. Too many plot lines are left hanging, and the penultimate sequence is just plain bizarre. (I can't call it disconnected because the unexplained events up to that point are not really connected, either.) No spoilers here, but just exactly where does it come from? Natalie Portman is competent but predictable (in a film that isn't, depending on your expectations). Oscar Isaac seems to have wandered in from some other film (which according to scuttlebutt at the time, he actually did.) Gina Rodriguez seemed to be warding off Jane the Virgin. She only partially succeeded; elements of her TV character kept creeping in. Jennifer Jason Leigh found her character masterfully, but then had very little opportunity to develop it. This did not make her last appearance easy or credible. In short, ANNIHILATION needed to be a limited series on Netflix, Amazon or Hulu. This rendition at least needed too much exposition for a feature film.