On Annihilation,
the movie
1. Ghost Bird is Missing
This will not be a review of how Annihilation the movie differs from Annihilation the book. But having read
the book multiple times, I cannot help but notice some of the differences.
Maybe I should say this will not be a review of the qualitative differences between the two. Yes, they are different,
one might say radically different. But they do different things; they formulate
different concepts.
That said, Ghost bird, aka the biologist,
aka the narrator/journal-keeper of the book, does not appear in the movie. I
think of this as a cinematic decision. Filming a character writing in a journal
is boring. Having a character speak in voiceover is cliché. The movie, then,
subtracts the biologist’s words, and thus, a specific sense of her interiority,
her closely kept privacy. The biologist of the book is socially-inward and somewhat
unprofessional. The novel’s psychologist reminds her “you were let go from a
number of your field jobs” (122). The disappearance of Ghost bird makes perfect
sense for the movie and weirdly fulfill a promise of the novel. In the novel
Ghost bird seems on the verge of disappearing on every page. The movie makes
that disappearance manifest.
2.
Names are Present
Instead of Ghost bird, the movie gives us
Lena, a molecular biologist with a PhD who teaches and researches at Johns
Hopkins University (if I remember her credentials correctly; I’ve only seen the
movie once.) Yes, she has a name. All of the characters have names. For those
who have read the book, and are familiar with the absence of the characters’
names (they are called “the biologist,” “the psychologist,” etc.) these names
sound shocking when first heard, as if we are learning something we should not
know. And we are. Annihilation the
movie amplifies what the book can only suggest—the power of sound and light.
The characters’ names enable the movie’s dialogue and allows them to form
relationships. For part of the movie, the five women who enter the shimmer seem
to really care about each other, in stark contrast to their mostly adversarial
relationship in the novel. And then there is the shimmer itself. In the novel,
the border is ephemeral, invisible, almost indescribable. Expedition members
must be hypnotized to cross the border. They walk right into the shimmer.
3.
Light and Sound
The shimmer shapes the whole movie. It is kaleidoscopic
light; when the expedition walks through it, everything around them takes on
the shimmer—colors refract through the trees and reeds and in the sky. This shimmer
makes Annihilation beautiful. We see
white deer with bright flowers growing in their antlers, like they have fled
from a Miyazake movie. Flowers are everywhere. Vibrant, multicolor blooms flow
from the same branch, giving the expedition one of their first clues that the
shimmer not only refracts light and radio waves, but also DNA.
We see crystalline trees explode into
orange light. We see phosphorous grenades explode in incandescent light. Even
the lighthouse itself, rendered as a beautiful white structure encased in
something like shell or bone, gets in on the act. It goes up in flames and
burns the screen bright white. Even the automatic weapons that the characters
carry, and fire often, send out bursts of light.
They send out sound, too, of course. Annihilation is loud. The conflict in
the lighthouse throbs with sound; the theater I was in shook during this scene.
Lena struggles with a creature that mirrors her and shimmers with light. It
does not speak but it fills the space of the lighthouse with sound. Ben Salisbury’s
and Geoff Barrow’s score might be emanating from the creature’s body. Not only
light, but sound too, shimmers. Strings and static give way to a noise that
might be a refracted voice. The “voice” divides and get louder. It phases in
and out. It shimmers.
4.
Annihilation
might be a horror movie
Amidst all this beauty, Annihilation might actually be a horror
movie. The bear-like creature that stalks the expedition and screams and shrieks
in the voice of one of them as it kills her presents a more horrifying vison of
becoming-something-else than most of the creatures of the novel, such as the
dolphin with human eyes. Likewise, the scenes of Lena’s interrogation by a member
of the Southern Reach dressed in a white anti-contamination suit, while a crowd
of blue-suited individuals watch from behind glass, points to the fear of
infection than runs through the movie.
Having one’s DNA altered by the shimmer
seems cancerous in the movie. The opening scene shows Lena lecturing students
about a dividing cancer cell as she shows them a microscopic view of this
division in action. Dr. Ventress (the psychologist) does not want to leave the
shimmer, in part, because she is dying of cancer. Lena examines some human
cells while inside the shimmer, and they divide and divide, each new division
infected by the light of the shimmer. The shimmer infects everything. It cannot
be escaped. Unlike Ghost bird, who stays within the borders of Area X, Lena
wants to escape the shimmer.
[SPOILER
ALERT]
In the lighthouse, Lena’s encounter with
the creature made of light and sound is a struggle. Lena tells her interrogator
that she fought the creature. She ignites a phosphorous grenade, which allows
her to escape the shimmer through the doors of the lighthouse. Lena does not share
Ghost bird’s ambivalence, even embracement of Area X. Lena flees the shimmer,
and during her interrogation suggests that the shimmer is of extraterrestrial
origin (we see something like a comet strike near the lighthouse at the
beginning of the movie).
As she reunites with her husband in the
movie’s final scene, they embrace, and he asks her a simple question: “Are you
Lena?” She does not answer. The camera closely focuses on her eyes. Her eyes shimmer
with light. The shimmer, whatever it is, is not finished spreading. It is
beautiful.
