Well put together but slightly hyped science fiction.

Rating: Null/10 (13 March 2018)

At the U.S. government's Area X facility on a Southern coast, cellular biology professor and former U.S. Army soldier Lena undergoes quarantined debriefing about an expedition.
Alex Garland's Annihilation begins with an interrogation. Lena Kerans, played by Natalie Portman tells of what happened to her team Dr Ventress (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) alongside Radek the physicist, Sheppard the geomorphologist and Thorensen the paramedic goto find out what became to the previous team who entered The Shimmer, which hangs like a spectrum bubble over an area in north America. The Shimmer has the potential to swallow the entire planet.
The cast are great, the special effects, the environment and animals which inhabit The Shimmer are impressive, however, Annihilation is pretty uneventful and feels padded out. 2001 (which it has been compared too) it certainly is not. Garland, a writer/director with a solid track record: 28 Days Later, Dredd and Ex Machina to name a few offers high production values, interesting visuals but subjectively speaking with only a 115 minutes run-time it feels ten times that and it's not a deep or as intellectual as mainstream reviews would make you believe.
Three highs spring to mind after viewing Annihilation, two of these involve animal/creature attacks and thirdly it's female cast, we know they are female, yet they still unnecessary had to acknowledge their gender in the film's dialogue. The final sequence offers some thought provoking alternatives if you don't believe Kerans' account of the film's events. However, taken at face value it's all tied up neatly, that Karan has become something more and her husband is an alien. Either way Annihilation is one of those slow films that the mass audience is meant to like because they're told too. You may want to skip this and watch one of Garland's other works.