Yet another sad sci-fi

Rating: 6/10 (6 October 2019)

It's funny how we love categorizing things, as if putting a label on something makes it easier to understand. "Science Fiction" is one of those labels which makes us think we know what to expect. But sci-fi films may be as different as a horror movie and a Mickey Mouse documentary. There are serious sci-fi's like Terminator or Alien, there are epic sci-fi's like Avatar, there are even yeehaw sci-fi's like Back to the Future.
And there's this genre I'd call SSD. Slow, Sad and Disturbing. Something sad like Nocturnal Animals, something slow like Arrival, something disturbing like Enemy, but joined together into a single pseudo-hypnotic experience.
Annihilation isn't gonna annihilate anything but two hours of your time spent on watching this. What it can give instead as a semi-bitter and semi-disgusting sense of wading through treacle of the author's convoluted imagination and troubled visions.
It can also give you some food for thought and imagery abstract enough to stir your own desire to interpret things. Which may be the major goal for any art form. In this sense, Annihilation does indeed not destroy, but instead just changes what exists and creates what hadn't existed before.
If you find this text difficult to interpret and not too pleasant to read, that's probably a good thing, because it's giving you a sense of what you'll probably feel watching this film. So it's up to you to decide whether you wanna volunteer for such a task. However, one thing is certain: if you are tired of banal stories and superheroes with blasters, then Annihilation would certainly become a refreshing experience.