Beyond The Shimmer

Rating: 5/10 (2 March 2018)

Alex Garland's adaptation of Annihilation is ambiguous at best. The film is loosely based off of Jeff VanderMeer's best selling 'Southern Reach' trilogy. The plot of the film follows the basic outline of around four experts entering the Shimmer to investigate the root cause. Natalie Portman plays the film's lead Lena, with Jennifer Jason Leigh as the psychologist, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, and Tuva Novotny.
The film is told in the perspectives of flashbacks and real time. This makes the viewer easily lose interest in the story if it it doesn't have some sort of consistent thread running through. One of the effects of being in The Shimmer is that you develop a form of dementia. After crossing over, the team awoke with no memory of what happened but deduced through food rations they had been inside for at least three days.
This would have been a very interesting perspective of story telling, however the time jump between the flashbacks, Lena's interrogation, and time spent in the Shimmer is so large that you can never fully get invested. The best parts of the films were when they were inside The Shimmer.
The set director created a world much like that of The Last Of Us with a seemingly constant growth of fungi. It's sort of explained that the rate of evolution moves much faster in this zone and therefore animals and plants take on an other-worldly appearance. Again, just as you are beginning to really get into these moments you are ripped out by a flash back or the interrogation.
On top of this, any time you begin to get a hint of an explanation as to what is going on you are pulled to a totally different scene. It get's more frustrating as the movie goes on because things just stop making sense. This makes it sound like one of those movies that you have to be an intellectual to understand, but it just doesn't make sense. It's almost like Alex Garland took the main parts of the book he liked and then tried to put them together with not much in between.
If you want to make an intriguing sci-fi movie, all the dots need to connect at the end. A lot of the scenes seemed either out of context or just very badly timed, moments that seemed shocking or intriguing were dropped or instantly switched gears. With all of this being said the movie isn't completely terrible.
In fact, the five characters we follow are portrayed very well by the respective actors. Each character had a slightly obscured past, after all this 'suicide mission' is volunteer, that you wanted to know more about. Unfortunately the film didn't offer much character growth for any of them, including the lead.
All things considered this probably wouldn't be your best choice for a movie date, but if you really wanna see it give it a shot. For this writer, the movie wasn't very intriguing as a whole and did many things that reminded me of other sic-fi's I would rather have watched. I understand what the director was going for but in all honesty, I don't feel it was achieved.