Remembering what it's like to not understand

Rating: 10/10 (15 March 2018)

In Iain M Bank's novel Excession, one of the sentient super-intelligent spacecraft observes:
"An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop."
And so when the alien asteroid / seed / spacecraft (call it what you will) lands on Earth, we encounter such a thing. Just as when the British Empire's ships landed on an isolated stone-age island, the humans of the film have no context in which to place the events unfolding, hidden, within The Shimmer. All the Earth-islanders know is that something has arrived which makes no sense, over which they have absolutely no power, and which entirely reshapes their core belief of being masters of their immediate surroundings.
Only in Annihilation, the reshaping is not one of an encounter with a higher form of technology or scientific knowledge. It's a disassembling of the sense of explanation to which we have become so familiar. In an era where explanations, scientific or not, are just a screen-tap away, the ultimate shock to us is to be put into an environment where we cannot possibly find understanding - not even an invented one of Russian bot conspiracy theories. The sense of control over ideas that our technology has given us is deliberately cast to one side here.
Garland has described his film as being the book remembered as a dream, and the narrative is true to that statement. Time jumps with no memories to fill in the gap. Characters simply disappear, with barely a thought given to them once they've gone. There is a sense that your body is not quite how your body should be. And understanding is impossible because real-world logic has been suspended. The casting itself is evokes the dream-like nature of the film. Existenz (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Westworld (Tessa Thomson) and Black Swan (Portman) all blur the boundaries between real and unreal.
The film will divide critics and viewers. There is allegory, namely the inherent nature of self-destructiveness that is part of life, and the fact that life simply does what it does, be it human or alien. At the end of the interview between Lena (Portman) and Lomax (Wong), Lena says that the alien did not want anything and was not destroying, but simply changing things. That's also true of the greater arc of humanity. Human society, as an entity, has no sense of autonomy, and whilst it may look like we're destroying the Earth, the truth is that we're actually just changing it.
However, the greatest strength of Garland's films is his willingness to confront the audience with realistic characters and avoid simple morality tales. To overcome her mirror self, Lena realises she can't defeat her reflection by brute force. Only through an act of guile can she win the day, guile which she has practiced through the deceit of her husband. It's not often we see the hero survive by exploiting character traits the contemporary audience finds unpalatable. It's a simple observation, that deceit is one of our species' most advanced evolved attributes - but it's one we do not like to admit.
As for the ending? The prism of The Shimmer is the prism of human interaction. That great generator of invention, the chopping and changing, and cutting and pasting of ideas, thoughts and feelings that makes up the human experience. Lena is Lena, but something new has been added to her. Kane is alien, but some of Kane has been added to him. Both have changed, both have mutated, both have evolved.
Annihilation is, in my opinion, one of the greatest Sci-Fi movies ever made. It's a literary film, and recalls the works of Kurt Vonnegut in its use of high-concept sci-fi story-telling as a framework for intimate existential human study. Whilst not as beautifully constructed as 2001: A Space Odyssey, it has a free-form and fluid feeling to it that Kubrick's controlling style prevents. The ending to Annihilation may not be as explicitly profound as 2001, but it's philosophically subtler. More art-house than smart sci-fi in its denouement, Annihilation is closer to the simultaneously enigmatic and visceral styles of Shane Carruth's Upstream Color or Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin than the beautifully meticulous artifice of Denis Villeneuve as seen in Arrival or Blade Runner 2049. It is, therefore, far more challenging.
Paramount did well to pull the film from international cinema markets. It does take a while to get going, and most viewers will lose interest before the pieces come together. It's not really an audience-friendly film, to be honest, and if you've read my review this far and enjoyed the film as much as I did, you're probably, like me, the most pretentious member of your circle of friends. Anyway, whilst I wish I'd had the chance to see it on the big screen in the UK, it would have been branded as a flop and that would have been a great tragedy. In a parallel universe where Oscars are given for artistic merit, this film would sweep the board. If it's lucky, in this one it'll get a handful of token nominations.
Thank you Netflix, btw.