Take all the ideas from all the sci-fi movies you want. It won't work anyway.

Rating: 4/10 (17 May 2018)

Remember a time when sci-fi directors weren't so full of themselves? Well that is not this time. Nowadays, if you see a sci-fi flick you better be ready for pretentiousness, clumsiness, and a complete lack of a characterization or logic. And that's what goes with this movie. Alex Garland, the director, surely saw Under the Skin, Prometheus (btw I don't like it either), Arrival,The Thing and Stalker, and said 'Hey, I can cram all these movies together into a brilliant masterpiece! Maybe I'll end up leaving aside what made these movies good, but whatever'. And now you got Annihilation.
Good things.

The acting. For the most part, the actors make a good job. Of course, Natalie Portman rules and all, albeit this is not her best performance.
The scene with the creature who can imitate the voice of the dead woman. Why? Because it's tense, well acted, well directed and conveys the terror this movie needed throughout the entirely of it. Unfortunately, that terror goes away in the next sequences.

Bad things.
The rest of it. The major problems.

The coherence of the script. This is a script with a tremendously flawed coherence. Literally, every strategy that the main characters follow doesn't make any bit of sense. What is the purpose of sending a group of scientists without any military support? They know the zone is dangerous, so wth movie??? But hey, they give to them machine guns, so the problem is fixed. LOL. And this is just the beginning. I mean, every decision they made is stupid, every word they say is wrong, I don't buy neither the logic of the characters nor the movie's logic.

The squandered premise. Actually the premise as such is never a good or a bad thing, but the using of it. The shimmer and its expansion is never mentioned again except in the first act, what makes this information irrelevant and kills the main danger of this shimmer. Another interesting thing introduced in the movie is the fact that when you enter the shimmer, you got these weird gaps in your memory, to the point they don't remember anything that happened in the first three days. This could have made the shimmer much more interesting and cryptic, but the movie doesn't keep up with this logic for much long. After the inicial three days, all their memories remain intact and the mistery that could have been built up around that is squandered.

The subplot with the black guy. Oh my god! That was so freakin pointless.

The flashbacks. They are badly placed, what can be a poorly editing choice, I guess. Except a couple of them, they were totally unnecessary as well.

The pretentiousness. The third act is just an attempt to explain to us, the audience, that this is an art film and we all should bow before the director. Pretentious visuals and pretentious explanation (a not even proper one, btw) of the aliens, which was not needed, AT ALL. I mean, the entire movie was about the shimmer and the mystery around it. Who cares about aliens wanting to duplicate humans for whatever reason? Come on, that's lame.

The very ending. I want to think that the last sequence tries to leave some kind of mistery? Well, that's stupid, pointless and unnecessary. We know Natalie Portman is human, furthermore, who cares if it's the alien? The movie was not about that!

The CGI. Excuse me? IT SUCKED! Nothing looks real! The crocodile or the creature were fake as hell! The visuals are OK, but come on! They are pretty generic! There is not a sense of atmosphere or immersion(look the Thing, or Aliens). They are pretty bland. Not bad-just bland.

The stupid overexplanations. They try to explain every detail of how things mutate, which sometimes sounds so pompous, absurd and ridiculous that made me laugh not few times!By the way...What's up with the cue cards???? Are you serious? When they enter the shimmer, they come up with a stupid cartel saying "SHIMMER". Wha? No shit men! Thank you for clear that up!

The dialogue. Not organic, pretentious and unrealistic.

In conclusion, this movie is exactly what it seems. A sci-fi trying to be good and failing.