For those who are too lazy or just closed minded to actually dig deeper into the symbolism behind every scene of the movie. It is actually very intelligent.

Rating: 10/10 (5 April 2020)

A very atypical sci-fi movie that seems to be very bizarre if you don't dig deep enough. I was shocked to read so many bad reviews on this movie on IMDb with the lowest rating. It is so underrated since it has so much to say. Obviously these people are not interested to open their minds a bit wider and to at least try to discover if there is something more meaningful and intelligent behind the special effects, "not logical actions", and the weirdness of everything. It's a "difficult " sci-fi that requires some brain work which is quite rare for the genre.
The movie is visually and conceptually outstanding, even tho the concept part is way less obvious. It kind of reminds of the movie "Mother!" By Aronofsky in a way that so many people didn't read between the lines to understand the philosophy behind the whole plot so the movie ended up with a bad rating even tho it's literally genius in my opinion.
The key to the concept is in the name of the movie itself. Annihilation means destruction and literally every single thing happening in the shimmer is self-destructive including the members of the expedition, where you can find drug abuse, self harm, cheating on a husband and etc in their past. In other words the whole movie is a metaphor for cancer - it comes from mutation of the cells and it's self-destructive. The shimmer itself is cancer and everyone who entered the shimmer has its own ways of fighting with it like people do in real life. That's why all the members have different faiths. To start with, the main character Lena is a cancer pathology expert, the leader of the mission Dr Ventress is dying of cancer and the linguist Cass had a daughter who died of blood cancer. The meteor striking the lighthouse is an unexplainable phenomenon same as when cancer strikes a human. Cancer spreads exactly in a way like the shimmer is expanding. Every single memeber of the group relates to the shimmer just like all humans can relate to the disease. Some want to fight it like Lena, who doesn't give up and is the only one who survives at the end, some want to understand it like the doctor, some just accept it and let it go like Josie, some fear it like Anya and for some it strikes suddenly like for Cass. The fact that the monster bear could scream in a voice of its last victim is a metaphor for those who suffered so much while fighting cancer that the last thing that is left for their relatives is this painful scream for help.
When Lena gets to the lighthouse - the heart of the shimmer, we are hoping to find answers there but, unfortunately, we still don't have them. What we see is this alien figure that is also Lena at the same time. The phosphor grenade symbolizes chemotherapy. And finally, we are puzzled at the end by the question who are the survivors? Are they the original selves or are they the doubles from the shimmer? Well, actually that doesn't matter anymore since anyone who survived the horrors of cancer are not the same people as we always knew them.