One of Those Movies You Love and Hate at the Same Time for Different Reasons

Rating: 7/10 (1 June 2019)

This is a very interesting and bold sci-fi film that does everything right story-wise, but it has some major flaws that kept me distracted for the majority of its running time.
I love the premise of the film and its take on aliens. Whenever we see aliens in movies, their behaviors and motives are almost always in line with ours or simply they are animals with some super predatory attributes. Everything they do is similar to and explicable by our own experiences and the things we are familiar with. They either come with warships to invade us, exactly like a country would do to another country, with weapons and warfare; or in the case of the latter, they hunt a small group of people until the last one, a protagonist, kills them at the end. Now I don't necessarily have a problem with those movies, as long as they are well made, but they all have a very simplistic approach to the question of an alien's behavior and motives. This film however does completely the opposite, the alien(or aliens) in Annihilation is so weird that I am only about 90% sure that it was an alien, and that is after the film literally spelled it out loud for the audience. I love an unsolved mystery in my movies and we are rarely gifted with those, because they make movies to satisfy a general audience, they are dumbed down for the lowest common denominator, so they don't hate the film because they don't ''understand'' it. I don't need to know everything at the end, I don't need to say ''Oh, so, that's how that happened!'' That's why the alien was so interesting and weird, we don't even know what it wants, it causes trouble but we are not sure if it is doing it as an attack on us or if it is even aware that it causes harm to us, all of which makes the alien much more interesting and genuienly creepy, much creepier than a mindless killing machine.
However, as much as I loved the premise of the film, it has done very little with that premise. It has so much potential and could have been much better. The film seems to have suffered from low budget and it looks comically cheap sometimes. And that rainbow colors theme doesn't help. There is a weird contrast of visuals that doesn't work; when the characters are indoors and at the safety of their homes, It is dark and they act overly dramatic and there is a sense of depression, all of which are so unwarranted and it feels like a different movie, you feel like you are watching a haunted house or a possession story and it feels so unnecessary. Whereas when our characters are in the shimmer, there is a theme of rainbow colors and it doesn't fit at all. The sets looks cheap, like someone decorated the trees with plastic decorations. They clearly had a low budget and couldn't find a smart way around it. The world design is very important for me in a science fiction, but it was to the detriment of the film in this case, because it's done so poorly.
Having said all of that, I still highly recommend it because of its originality and weirdness. The ending alone is worth watching. If its budget had matched the ambition of its writing, this film could have been a sci-fi classic.