Just Because it Has Trippy Effects Doesn't Mean It's Like 2001

Rating: 3/10 (24 August 2018)

I love smart, cerebral science fiction, and that is what I expected this movie to be, based on what I'd heard about it. That's not what this is. If I'd gone in expecting a dumb monster movie with cool effects, I might have enjoyed it a lot more. I saw it with my dad, who complained (frequently) that it's practically an uncredited remake of Stalker (1979), a Russian movie which does the same tricks but better. I haven't seen Stalker yet, so I won't get into that.
The plot and character motivations lack focus, much like the narrative time-line. The repetitive flashbacks are unnecessary at best and annoying at worst. I thought it might become totally chronologically unhinged, like in Enter the Void or Slaughterhouse 5, but the parts which take place in the Shimmer (the alien monster world) remain chronological, and stay focused enough to make the flash-forwards and flash-backs feel like a distraction.
Everything to do with the characters doesn't work or is underdeveloped, and at least once it's openly misogynistic - two of the girls are supposed to have military training, but they never act like they're in enemy territory, or any kind of danger at all. They don't set up a watch or perimeter until they see the men's notes on how they did it, like as if female soldiers wouldn't have been trained on surviving in life-or-death situations.
It establishes that the main character, played by Natalie Portman, is a doctor, whose husband is the only person to escape the Shimmer. He sustains massive organ failure and shock in doing so, and even after she says out loud that her husband's illness could be caused by radiation or a virus, they never wear any protective gear, or discuss why they aren't. This is also after scenes where people wear HAZMAT suits to interact with her husband, but she doesn't, and after we see scenes where people wear HAZMAT suits to interact with her, in the flash-forwards after she escapes. It would make sense if they were purposefully trying to infect her and her team, which I suspected when Jennifer Jason Leigh's character said she had a secret mission she wasn't sharing (like in Alien), but at the ending of the movie she reveals that wasn't what was going on at all.
I thought they might be pregnant with monsters after the four day blackout, like in Village of the Damned, because of a scene where they discuss being an all female team, but of course, that didn't happen. The fact that they're all women bears no significance to the story, and, frankly, neither does them being scientists. The few scientific observations they make could have been made by a high school freshman who paid attention in their biology lessons. It isn't hard to talk to scientists and doctors about science fiction to find out what their observations might be, but the writer, Alex Garland, obviously couldn't be assed. She doesn't even take her blood and look at it with her microscope until long after they had a four day blackout, after she gets mysterious bruises, which she would know were serious symptoms as a medical doctor, and after they knew everyone who went before them got killed, except for one guy, who was in critical condition.
Now, these things could have largely been explained by establishing that the Shimmer was making them feel like they were high or tripping (like, apparently, in Stalker), but they never discuss feeling funny, or otherwise act strange in ways that would make that clear. It would, again, be easy to write a scene that shows they're all tripping too hard to think clearly, and would have made the movie more fun. It's mentioned in the "debriefing" flash-forwards that Portman stayed for months longer than she had rations for, and it could have further explained the weird behavior if they'd run out of rations and eaten plants or animals within the Shimmer. It would would have worked as a reference to both fairy tales and psychedelic drugs, but the subject was dropped right after it was mentioned, like nearly every opportunity for interesting writing.
It's hard to stress enough the ways in which the writing doesn't make realistic sense in any of the ways it's expected to. There's a scene where Jennifer Jason Leigh's character is supposed to be keeping watch for monsters, and she not only has a bright lamp spotlighting her, but also is reading by it, and not watching at all. She does this when her character is supposed to be ex-military. You're not even supposed to light three cigarettes to a match in enemy territory, let alone have a lamp on you. When they do get attacked by a monster, because she wasn't watching, they, again, never talk about it or discuss it at all. There are lots of dialogue scenes in this movie, too many, in fact, but never the right ones. There's thirty minutes of exposition at the beginning of the movie before it even gets to monsterland, and Garland still couldn't find a way to write personality or clear motivations into his characters.
He pulls his punches repeatedly with the horror movie elements, as well. When in the Shimmer, they find a video of Portman's husband (Oscar Isaac) cutting open the guts of one of his team members to reveal snakey, monster-guts. The paramedic character is inexplicably grossed out by the gore, which is amazing - like, honest to God, had Garland ever met a paramedic? But I digress - they then find the guy's body all blown up into fungus on a wall in a super-creepy way. I fully expected him to have characters go all Tetsuo the Iron Man after that, but, you know, with lichen or whatever. What he did instead was show a couple of the girls with weird bruises, twice. I think once a special effect changed someone's finger print, but it was so subtle I couldn't see it on my TV, and I have a big TV. After Tetsuo, The Thing, Alien, Akira - and, hell, The Andromeda Strain, there's just no excuse for getting military and medical stuff wrong in science fiction, and no excuse for chickening out on body and medical horror.
The acting is a real problem, too, and certainly doesn't help the piss-poor character development. Almost all the lead actors are people I like in other movies, particularly Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac, but everyone's lines are delivered in this weird mumbling monotone, which is just bad directing - shocking, of course, since the same guy wrote and directed it. I could hardly understand a thing the characters said, and when I turned the volume up the sound effects were deafening. This movie also features the least sexy sex scene in any movie I have ever seen, and it involves Natalie Portman. Seriously, HOW DO YOU MESS THAT UP?
Alex Garner, the writer/director, also doesn't seem to understand he's supposed to be entertaining the audience - there is hardly a single joke in the entire movie, except for the lesbian girl hitting on Natalie Portman. Of course, he doesn't follow through on that character being an aggressively flirtatious lesbian at all, so I forgot about it pretty much immediately, which is impressive, because I love lesbians - like I said before, none of the character stuff works at all. The main character has zero personality outside of missing her man when he's gone. She's a doctor, but that never plays in any of her behavior. In a flashback scene she tells her husband she has a life, and doesn't just pine after him while he's away, but all we ever see her do is pine after him and refuse to socialize. It's ridiculous.
I liked the deer, though.