Another intelligent and atmospheric sci-fi movie from Garland

Rating: 8/10 (5 July 2018)

Annihilation properly lives up to the significant hype. With excellent visual effects, the shimmer felt unique and bizarre as it was intended to. Good performances, Portman is great and Garland brings his meticulous, tense style again. It definitely leaves me with plenty of thoughts. My understanding of the general theme is: there is some being or force that arrives and the shimmer surrounds it and grows outwards. The shimmer area refracts light and DNA, and also interacts with everything in it. So when people enter it, their biology is fundamentally changed and their cells multiply aggressively. DNA also interacts, as we see in the plants and animals of the area. When Kane and then Lena interact with the being at the lighthouse, that causes a duplicate of themselves to arise.
The ending is a classic ambiguous but precise ending. First, the scene with Lena dancing/ fighting with her clone was brilliant and wild to watch, with lots of thematic depth. In the end, consistent with the central theme of self destruction, she escapes by giving her clone a bomb and burning down the lighthouse and the being. When the being is destroyed, the shimmer shuts down and the shimmer cells in other living things stop the aggressive reproduction they had been undergoing. This saves Kane. The ambiguity arises in Lena - many theorize that because we see her eyes flicker like Kane's, that she was actually a duplicate. This would explain why she didn't have clear memories from the trip, I think she had the emotional memory that indicates she was the original Lena. Of course she was fundamentally changed by interacting with the shimmer, but I think that shimmer addition to her DNA is what causes her eyes to look that way. The flash in their eyes just shows the presence of shimmer DNA, not that they were created in the shimmer.
This movie is thematically brilliant, and the more I consider it the more I appreciate it. The extension of the cell tendencies to multiply from her initial lecture were obvious. The movie definitely has messages about cancer and what biologically defines a person. At its core, I think it's about the human nature struggle between aggressive replication and self destruction.
This is a film that raises a lot of questions and is truly art, with so many relevant themes and possible takeaways. While I would've liked even deeper understanding of the characters (especially the psychologist), and the ambiguous ending can be frustrating, it's very intelligent and, like Ex Machina, feels like each scene is deeply atmospheric, holds significant weight, and contributes to both plot and themes.