an amalgam marries a sui-generis brainwave with a less ground-breaking template

Rating: 7/10 (18 March 2018)

The follow-up to his enterprising AI thriller EX MACHINA (2014), novelist-come-filmmaker Alex Garland's second feature arrives sequentially in cinema first, then to the Netflix platform, a unique distribution exigency borne out of the ongoing profit re-shuffling feeding frenzy between old guards and future norm, boisterously in the name of the art of cinema.
ANNIHILATION, an adaptation from the first novel of Jeff VanderMeer's awards-reaping SOUTHERN REACH trilogy, structures its narrative in the time-honored trope of an (all-women) expedition team entering a terra incognita shrouded by extraterrestrial might (aka. The Shimmer, a slowly expanding electromagnetic field hitting our planet like a bolt out of blue), coming in for both extrinsic and internecine perils, until the last remaining human contending with the cosmic unknown and metaphysical transformation against all odds, and is furnished with an open-ended coda to mine the seed for a possible sequel (that uroboros tattoo is repeatedly flagged up to elicit piquant fan theories).
But conceptually, ANNIHILATION upholds an invigorating idea of random DNA synapsis in its core, catalyzed by the improbable phenomenon of prismatic refraction, and substantially surmises a possibility that the highly intelligent alien life form could be also flexibly amorphous, and it messes up all DNAs within its territory, knocking out animal/plant hybrids through haphazard genetic splicing and mutation, all the way to a physical replication of our doughty heroine, the biologist Lena (Portman, a relentless standard-bearer of true grits), which seemly consummates its nefarious mission of infiltration with a scorched-earth annihilation appearing more baffling than its scientific info-dump in the words from the physicist Josie Radek (a scare-easy Tessa Thompson), prior to her philosophical acceptance of her own botanical transmogrification.
As a Sci-Fi food-for-thought, the film wisely refrains from over-applying cheap jump-scares and unsightly shocking images to spook audience, and its SFX team fairly dreams up an unworldly biome with breathtaking futuristic grandeur and presents varicolored, cannibalized flora-and-fauna bricolage to handsome effect, albeit one might cavil that occasionally its hue feels solarized.
Heralded by the psychologist Dr. Ventress (a peerlessly detached, unforthcoming Jennifer Jason Leigh), the forlorn-hope also including Anya Thorensen (Rodriguez, fraught with agonized paranoid in a fanatical about-face), a gay paramedic and the geomorphologist Cass Sheppard (Novotny), is composed with a quintet of damaged goods, each is scarred by the disenchantment of their respective lives, which points up a meta-reference of human's self-destructive frailty, that resounds with a tint of hard-earned poignance. Rounding out its female-fronted cast is a terrifically enigmatic Oscar Isaac as Kane, Lena's soldier husband, whose mystical return from the Shimmer after a nearly one-year-long disappearance is the stimulant of Lena's own involvement.
On a whole, ANNIHILATION is a welcome expansion of our obsession with the mighty, unknown life force, an amalgam marries a sui-generis brainwave with a less ground-breaking template, moderately vamped up by a state-of-the-art mythical touch.