Unique movie experience

Rating: 9/10 (11 June 2018)

OK, to address some of the comments made against this movie, comments that have good foundation for complaint. First off, yes, nobody is wearing hazmat gear. They could have made the teams investigating wear hazmat gear, but it wouldn't have changed the outcome because the disease caused by the Shimmer is transmissable by fields, no actual contact is required. The movie would then spend time explaining that hazmat suits were no help. So, we could have watched people wander about in hazmat gear, but they spared us. Next issue, typical scary movie stupidity. Yes, characters do stupid things that expose themselves to increased risk. Yes, there seems to be a lack of concern for the threat the Shimmer poses the entire biosphere, but if the government cared as much as we know they would, the movie would have had tens of thousands of people dealing with the Shimmer and the world would be in a state of apocalyptic fear, and the area where the Shimmer was located would probably be nuked and still the same thing would have resulted if the writers decided to make this an unwinnable battle.
So, what is there to like among a field of characters who aren't likable? Why do characters need to be likable? How many people are likable after we know their dirty secrets? Each character has their own self destructive tendencies that exist to explain why these people are on a veritable suicide mission. Any lack of common sense can be explained by the Shimmer affecting the human brain.
What this movie had was a very unique alien, and instead of the alien being a bad guy, its so far away from anthropormorphization that we don't even know if the alien has an agenda or if we could understand it if it did. It appears as if its an unhappy accident for life on Earth, like a force of nature rather than a boogeyman. I really like the bear scene where a human voice was eerily issued through the bear's throat. It was scary but also fascinating and it was unique. Sure there are other movies with animals that turned evil, but I got the feeling the bear was just behaving according to its randomly modified behaviors and the poor creature itself is destined to the same outcome as every other life form on Earth.
I also liked how the protagonists weren't heroes of any sort. They had their motivations spurred on by increased risk taking due to personal problems in their lives, not because some case of super-patriotism. But that brought up the question to me, do motivations matter for those who stick their necks out to defend humanity? So, we got a sliver of the opinion that people tend to have periods of self destructive behavior that can cause harm or even death, rather than an overt case of altruism or suicide, but in the end if those people help, their personal reasons really aren't that important.
The final scenes with the psychologist turning into an alien construct or being was amazing and unique. I don't know if the alien was dub stepping or that was just music, but it didn't matter to me. I found the combination of less than likable characters, yet not hate-able, along with a unique amoral force-of-nature alien and the lack of a good versus evil mentality all came together to provide me with more entertainment that I have had for a movie in a long time. I was relieved to not see a multitude of orange explosions and tough guys silohuetted walking away from or falling 300 feet off of a cliff, sly smile, landing on one knee in a tough guy hero pose within feet of a raging inferno. It was nice to see a sci-fi movie without a Stan Lee cameo.
The only message the movie seem to send was that heroes may be flawed characters who have their own reasons for being heroic unlreated to altruism, and that a force of nature might end what we know as life on Earth without any intent whatsoever, that the most threatening things inimical to life might exist without moral judgment, even without what we think of as intelligence. Contrary to every super-hero movie, its not the evil people that will end life on Earth. It will be Mother Nature engaging in the cycles of destruction and creation that do us in, nothing personal. From the beginning of the movie, I could tell it was going to be a movie with an unhappy ending for humans, that life on Earth was going to be profoundly changed and there was going to be nothing we could do to prevent it. We typically see how the less intelligent humans find some clever way of saving the day in most movies, when realistically, if humankind faced the types of alien invasions faced in movies, we would be the ones going extinct because we just can't compete. It doesn't have to be an indictment, it can just...be.
In some respects the movie parallels the general anxiety among those in the free world at the lurch towards fascism and the global threat of climate change, a feeling that no matter what we do, the tide of culture moves in ways that humans can't adequately predict much less control. And no matter how much we try to ascribe evil as the prime mover of this frightening lurch, its just Mother Nature evolving in ways we have little or no control over. We can fret and complain and wish it weren't so, but it is so, and maybe partly because of this movie, maybe instead of being depressed and anxious until the day civilization falls into Taliban-like corruption, extremism and oppression, we can find some beauty in the destruction and understand this is how the universe operates, without compunction or favor, good and evil are utterly irrelevant.
This is a movie I watched three times nearly back to back, a very unusual situation for me as even some of my favorite movies I can only watch once. Other members of my family liked it pretty well, but not as much as I did. I find most sci-fi movies have hole filled plots and characters of horror movies always seem to do the stupidest things and suffer consequences we could all see coming a mile away. In that regard, Annihilation also shares some of those problems, but if you can get past the holes, you might enjoy the ride. I give Annihilation 9 stars because its not perfect, but it was immensely enjoyable to me. I did not inflate the value to offset the one star ratings. Its my genuine opinion and Annihilation will go down as one of my favorite sci-fi films. I am gladdened that the movie didn't have the run of the mill explosions and super hero poses and tough guy talk. The sex scenes were not frivolous nor gratuitous but they purposefully did feel awkward and unrewarding. I don't think that even if all the plot holes were filled and the characters didn't make dumb decisions, I don't think it would have changed how people feel about this movie, so don't let a few plot holes ruin this movie for you, or watch it with some trepidation and lowered expectations and you might be surprised. Its more about a feeling with this movie, a feeling that is hard to put a finger on, a feeling that for me tested my biases as a human being. I don't fault people who didn't like it, I just wasn't one of those people.