Annhiliation, over the weekend. (Well, actually, the last movie I watched was American Made, last night, based loosely on the life and times of crazy smuggler / runner / triple turncoat Barry Seal, gunned down by druglords in 1986, but I digress... there isn't much to say about that film, it's all pretty WYSIWYG.)
Loved it. Might be flawed, but I like ambiguous films (another film in that category being Under the Skin, also an adaptation). I'm a Garland fan typically. The last twenty minutes are both a strength and weakness, as it's more difficult to decide what the film is trying to convey in terms of idea, and the final moments aren't necessarily clear about whether the narrator is reliable. But it's going to linger with me a long time.
So I went and read the book since then, which is only 200 pages (pretty fast read, the text is not dense), and it's apparent the film is just a very loose adaptation; I would go as far to call it as "riffs on the same theme" that you would see in a story-telling class, where everyone gets the same basic concept and then you see how different the produced works are. Srsly, I am kind of surprised a studio optioned this book at all, it's really hard to imagine what they even thought the movie would look like (since books in general have a lot more leeway to introspect and internalize, whereas films have to SHOW.... and there's very little in the book that would be as interesting on the screen, it's all fuzzy and amorphous). Despite this, I plunged through the book anyway, and I think the section involving the Crawler is pretty profound from a writing perspective; I don't read enough Lovecraft, but it reminds me of that sense of alien, engulfing impressions rather than specification/explication that infiltrates much American writing. It's like a deluge experience where the human mind is trying to process this alien mentality and it can only be done through the tidal patter and ebb/swell of waves of language. tl;dr -- the book was hugely disappointing and yet eerily mesmerizing and I still can't stop thinking about it, I think my mind is trying to process something it just cannot grasp.
Anyway, back to the film. Garland weakened a bit of that because he had to put more of the plot into something concrete and explicable, in order to SHOW what was going on, on the screen. So the first 2/3 of this journey is eerie and unsettling, and there's of course the notorious middle section with is just excruciatingly SCREAMworthy (and for some reason, it just took my mind straight to that locked-up -- or maybe destroyed at this point -- tape of Timothy Treadwell and girlfriend being assaulted by a rogue bear a bit more over a decade ago?) ... it's a scene that will easily give most of the viewers nightmares.... but then we hit the lighthouse segment and that's when things just get surreal and crazy.
Anyway, Garland usually has a point to his films, which are where science and humanity intersect. We saw this in Ex Machina, which explored the impenetrable divide between AI and human ("just because AI might look human does not mean they share human values and interests, so how will we need to interact with them?") and Never Let Me Go ("Are clones property or human in their own right?") and Sunshine ("Is mankind intruding into the sphere of the divine by altering the life of a star, which is in essence the epitome of the creation of life itself?") and so on.
what I got out of Annihilation (and was also somewhat a general point from the book, depending on how you read it) was that nature itself looks indifferently upon humanity. We see ourselves as special, but to the life process, we are just one of many alterations and/or stages that fuel the evolutionary process of change/life itself, a waypoint in itself, so we hold no special place. This can be extremized and epitomized by the idea of cancer (which is basically life running out of control, without boundary or structure, so the cells live but the host dies). The "big deal" though is, that unlike much life (at least as far as we are cognizant of), we are actually self-aware and thus understand what is happening to us, more or less, as these changes occur. Transformation, as who we WERE passes away and we become something other than what we were. In few other movies is change so unequivocally associated with death; it's got hints of Flowers for Algernon (for example), where a man who became very smart for a time now feels his intelligence slipping from him and he is losing who he had become.
Anyway, the whole movie is dreamy, shadowy, eerie, unsettling, alien. And humans are just putty for something that can rearrange the building blocks of life. How do we deal in the face of realizing our own malleability?
It's rare that films involving supernatural elements try to depict the connotations of an alien presence rupturing and communicating through the laws of normality in such a detailed way, and I think I admire it for that as a horror film.
