On Annihilation

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.