Pseudointellectual nonsense adventure movie gone beyond bad

Rating: 2/10 (6 March 2019)

The premise of the movie is that something called The Shimmer has been expanding for three, I repeat, three years in a national park. The officials have sent expeditions in with no one returning except Natalie Portman's husband Oscar Isaac who remembers nothing about it. The Shimmer is like an instagram filter that's begun to remix the DNA of literally everything that's caught in. Lead scientist covering the event explains that it's "a religious event, an extraterrestial event, a higher dimension - we have many theories, few facts".
I thought this line 15 minutes into the movie was really nice and I had high hopes for this. I can't believe how wrong I was. The further the movie explores the concept, the less sense everything makes. The plot was beyond stupid and if there had been even one single rational person in the movie, this film simply wouldn't exist.
If the Shimmer got treated like they handled an extraterrestial threat in, for example, Arrival, it'd be a completely different movie. In Annihilation they just head straight into the Shimmer with a rifle and a backpack. The Shimmer has grown for three years and when they go in there they find out that their radios don't work in there. I'd think they could've tested that during those years pretty easily but who cares about logic, it's just a stupid adventure movie, let's head towards the danger and wait for everything to work out conveniently.
Acting ranged from passable to horrible, but especially the dialogue felt really forced and shallow. The only two reasons the characters had anything to say was to 1) wonder how everything is so strange and mysterious 2) to explain the messy plot to the viewer.
I love Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac, Alex Garland and science fiction so I can't understand what went this badly wrong here. It feels like several different people wanted to tell their own story and the end result is such a horrible and silly mess. I'm pretty sure that this movie is going to age like a can of butter that's left outside for the summer.