engaging, scary, creative and thought-provoking

Rating: 7/10 (26 February 2018)

"Annihilation" (R, 1:55) sounds like it should be a sci-fi - horror - action movie. As the musical prophet (Meat Loaf) has taught us: two out of three ain't bad. This movie is firmly in the sci-fi / horror camp. There is some action, but the focus is more on the characters - a female cast, atypical for the genre.
Oscar winner Natalie Portman stars as Lena, a medical school biology instructor and former U.S. Army soldier, whose active-duty special forces husband (Golden Globe winner Oscar Isaac) goes missing on a top-top secret mission - for a whole year. When Kane suddenly shows up in the hallway outside his old bedroom, he's... not himself. After an emotional embrace, Lena demands answers from the practically catatonic Kane, but he doesn't have many. Then, he experiences a severe medical episode which lands him - and Lena - in a top-top-top secret government facility just outside a gradually expanding land and shoreline area called "The Shimmer", hidden behind a colorful curtain of light through which drones, animals and people have been sent, never to be seen or heard from again, well, except for Kane, that is.
Rather than sitting on her hands while Kane may be dying in that building, Lena talks the facility's psychologist (Oscar nominee Jennifer Jason Leigh), into letting her come on the expedition she's about to lead into the Shimmer, along with three fellow scientists, played by Gina Rodriguez, Josie Radek and Tuva Novotny. Since the male military teams haven't been able to survive the Shimmer, maybe, just maybe, female scientists (or, simply, scientists, as one of them points out to Lena) will be able to have more success. They each have their own reasons for volunteering for what may well turn out to be a suicide mission, and they each have their own struggles surviving an environment in which strange, new plants and animals exist - and rapidly... mutate - as do the bodies and minds of those in this expedition.
With "Annihilation", "Ex Machina" writer/director Alex Garland adapts the novel of the same name (the first in the "Southern Reach" trilogy) by Jeff VanderMeer and helms the film as well. As in Garland's previous work, the character development is excellent, the acting is great and the optics (the visual effects and the creatures) are stunning. This film is engaging, scary, creative and thought-provoking - Alex Garland at his finest. Framing the story in the context of a post-expedition interview does little to enhance the story and it actually reveals more of the story (told in flashbacks) than necessary - and the pace of much of the film is a bit slow - but "Annihilation" is solid, inventive and entertaining enough to make up for those minor flaws. "B+"