Annihilation: Pacing Not Included

Rating: 5/10 (13 March 2018)

So, when a trailer paints an action-horror adventure picture of a movie, you can be forgiven for expecting that when you go to see said movie. Annihilation is not an action-horror adventure.
What it is, is someone's (Alex Garland's, presumably) idea of a cerebral scifi horror, with allusions to exploring what it is to be human and body shock horror thrown in for "good" measure.
Now, firstly, I hate being misled by trailers. I've almost come to expect it by now, but it colours my view of the movie when I realise I have been duped. Secondly, I also hate pretentiousness in films and Annihilation has this in great supply. It wasn't enough to simply give us a good scifi horror movie, it had to pretend to be deeper than it was. It failed at that.
Any depth it might have had was thrown to the wall with the lamentable editing, which seemed designed to slow the movie's progress to a crawl to fill out the two hour runtime. There are, at best, only three or four important set-piece scenes in this movie but they are spaced out massively and the gaps inbetween filled with utterly redundant flashback scenes and filler content. This is, essentially, a short film padded out to feature length.
The effects are good, and the acting decent, but the story is full of holes and inconsistencies. Set decoration is variable, with some scenes looking truly amazing and others looking like the props manager raided the moth-eaten floats from some flower festival for lurid paper flowers to stick at random on trees and scenery.
The Shimmer has been on Earth for three years, we discover, yet in that time all that has happened is that people have been sent in and have not come out again. From the context of the film, this appears to be the only strategy that seems to be available to the investigators. We are also supposed to believe that all this has been kept secret for that length of time.
In the course of the movie, the comms gal tells us that her equipment is working, but that no signals get out of the Shimmer. Great, so technology works but not comms, so why haven't they sent in autonomous robotic machinery? Have it go in, record information, maybe even take samples, then come back out again. Machines can use dead-reckoning navigation far better than humans. No compass, or satnav required. There is no requirement within the story parameters as defined that they needed to send people in at all.
Nor is it explained, ultimately, what is going on. This is one of those "The audience should make their minds up about what is happeneing" kinds of deals. I always dislike these movies, simply because if you have something you want to say, then say it. Don't leave the audience to figure it out.
Alex Garland has gravitated to these sorts of pseudo-intellectual shams of late, what with this and Ex Machina. Needless to say they have received rgeat critical acclaim, but only middling success at the box office.
I don't have a problem with scifi being thought-provoking. In fact, I prefer it that way. But this is not thought-provoking, so much as head-scratching. An attempt at being clever without looking at your product and realising most people don't have your level of knowledge of it. I'm sure both the script and the book upon which it is based were much more satisfying than the film ended up being. As it stands, the movie is a disappointment and not a movie that most people will seek to re-watch in the future.
SUMMARY: Padded out short story that is not engaging and not at all as sold in the trailers. Some good scenes, but too much dull filler and a score that does little to draw you in to the tale. Not recommended.