Not as smart as it wants you to think.

Rating: 4/10 (18 March 2018)

Annihilation was meant to be the big mainstream breakthrough for the filmmaking team that made Ex Machina. Instead, it pretty much tanked, with much of the discussion of the movie in the media centering around politics (why an all female cast, why change the race of the lead) and most of the fan discussion online centering on whether the movie was too smart for the mainstream. My reading is this: if you go into this thing expecting something smart, you can see that but really, this is just an incredibly self important sci-fi film that could have worked but just doesn't.
Natalie Portman stars as a college professor in a deep state of grieving because her soldier husband (Oscar Isaac) is dead only for him to walk into their home like nothing happened after a year. Only now, he seems deeply shell shocked, won't discuss where he's been, and has a serious illness that gets him and her quarantined at a military base so shadowy even the viewer can't really tell what is going on in there. I know I sure couldn't. Whatever it is, Jennifer Jason Leigh is in charge and she's been closely monitoring an inexplicable phenomenon called the "Shimmer" emanating from meteor strike at its center.
Portman rather easily secures herself a spot on the next expedition into the Shimmer which will be led by Jason Leigh herself. And here is the first logic bump, why keep allowing people just to wander into this thing if no one ever comes out??? Maybe attach tethers to them, try going in with vehicles, something. But whatever. The next bump comes immediately after. There is very little development on the team. VERY LITTLE. I came to identify them as sad smart one (Portman), obsessed leader (Jason Leigh), one with slight accent, timid one, and hot headed one. It's not clear why they were chosen. They certainly don't seem to be preeminent in their fields and show no special levels of skill once inside. Portman was nothing but a college professor, for goodness sake. She did have some military experience but nothing suggests her service was particularly distinguished.
They get inside the Shimmer, find that their devices don't work, they lost time, and everything living, plant and animal, is being mutated. We learn this from an early encounter with a gator that has shark teeth and let me say that as pretty as the exteriors are, lush green vegetation lit by a rainbow prism created by the Shimmer, the special effects are not good. That first gator looks only slightly better than the gator from Lake Placid and that was what, 15 years ago now?
Later, characters start dying or going crazy despite the fact that we know next to nothing about them. So who cares what happens to them? I spent most of this movie just plain bored. With a seemingly intentional slow pace and no characters to latch onto, there was just nothing that I really cared about happening on screen. Normally I would have clicked off, and honestly I kind of wanted to, but decided to force my way to the end on the basis of reviewers claiming it gets dramatically better as it goes on. Saying it gets better really is just saying that it starts bad and gets marginally better. I wasn't so bored later but I still can't say it was good and to be perfectly honest, there's not much to recommend here.
If you want dumb creature fun, watch Deep Blue Sea. It you want heady horror, catch The Void. Hell, if you want a genre film with an all female cast, check out The Descent. Even the acting can't really save this thing because good actors are left such incredibly one note characters. This just feels like a fan fiction retread of Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" that thinks it's "2001 A Space Odyssey" and isn't nearly as good as either.