Edition 6: Annihilation
Forget everything you know and embrace everything you don't
*spoilers ahead*
Intro
Annihilation is a beast of a movie that my fetal film studies brain could barely wrap its head around. Overflowing with a robust plot with numerous interpretations and amazing performances by Gina Rodrigez, Natalie Portman, and Tessa Thompson, inspired is one word to describe how it’ll leave you feeling.
Based on the book of the same name, Annihilation follows Lena (Natalie Portman), a former member of the military and now a scientist. The film starts at the end and we see Lena sitting on a chair looking dazed and tired. Scientists surround her all dressed in hazmat suits. They interrogate her about a mission and characters that we don’t know about yet but we’re soon to find out.
In the beginning, Lena is very clearly a hollow shell of a former self we really don’t get to know. Her husband has vanished into thin air during a classified military expedition leaving her to grapple with the guilt of the affair that drove him away. When invited to a barbeque by her lover (who is also married might I add) she rejects the offer to paint their old bedroom instead. It’s when she’s painting the walls white when her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) reappears at the door.
A small moment of joy during their reunion is replaced with concern as we are moved to their dining table. Lena asks him questions the audience wants to know: where did he go and how did he get back? Kane seems to have no answers and even if he did he has no memory. We are all confused. Then we get a shot of their touching hands through a glass of water. Their fingers are distorted, you can’t tell whose fingers belong to whom foreshadowing the eerie theme of the movie. When Kane takes a sip, the clear water is tainted with blood.
On the way to the hospital, a frantic Lena and an ailing Kane are taken hostage by men in black. When she wakes up we are introduced to psychologist Dr. Ventress and Area X.
The Earth has Cancer and the Shimmer is a Tumor
When a meteor crashes into a lighthouse it gives birth to the Shimmer. Surrounded by a beautiful translucent shimmery boundary, no one knows what the Shimmer is. Whether approached by land or sea, drones, or people, anything or anyone that goes in never comes out. The government has evacuated entire communities to keep them from being engulfed by the ever-growing boundary. They’ve told lies to maintain peace but to those who know the truth the fear is palpable. If unsuccessful at their mission, the Shimmer will continue growing, engulfing anything and anyone in its proximity.
The Shimmer seems to be the clear villain in the story. It stands tall and bold encroaching on land that doesn’t belong to it. But it also makes no sense. We don’t know why it exists, where it comes from, what it wants. Unlike the humans in the story, it has no clear goal, no reason for being, and no purpose. It’s just the Shimmer. A terrestrial black hole. An abyss.
The mission is simple: gather data to study but most importantly get to the source of the Shimmer, the lighthouse, and eliminate it.
Lena volunteers for the next mission and is joined by Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Leigh), Anya Thorensen (Gina Rodrigez), Cassie Sheppard (Tuva Novotny), and Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson). An all-female team of scientists differs drastically from the all-male military unit sent before that included Lena’s husband. But watching them enter the Shimmer is no less troubling. The film does an excellent job of building suspense and tension. The willingness of those on the team to sign up for a suicide mission touches on the theme of self-destruction.
We know that Lena feels guilty about her affair and blames herself for pushing Kane to take up a mission he may never survive. She owed him and she was going to make things right and earn back his trust. But in a way, she was also punishing herself. Like if all went wrong and harm did befall her it would be a sweet moment of schadenfreude to atone for a sin that now leaves her husband dying. Sheppard had a daughter who died of leukemia. Anya is an addict and Josie has struggled with suicidal thoughts and self-harm. We learn later on that Ventress not only has no friends or family but also has cancer.
Ventress’s cancer is a theme in a film that has already mentioned mutations several times. In the main opening, we see Lena lecturing about the cancerous growth of cells. In a flashback, she mentions how aging is not a part of nature's design but rather a fault in our genes. Therein lies one theory of what exactly the Shimmer is: a tumor.
But this hypothesis doesn’t make the Shimmer any less menacing. When we meet the unit again, they are plagued with an amnesia that seems to have lasted for four days based on the amount of rations that are gone. They are disoriented and confused. Their compass doesn’t work and anything that sends a signal out is down. Ventress is as deadpan as ever and when Sheppard finds south that’s where they head.
Crossbreeds, Crocodiles, Bears oh my!
Their trek through the Shimmer reveals its beauty. The jungle is green and lush and the sun shines a rainbow of light through the boundary. Despite the threat it poses, it’s breathtaking. When the team comes across an abandoned hut, the beautiful flowers that have blossomed over it are strange. As noted by Lena they are grown from the same plant structure yet resemble different species. The crocodile that attacks them is plagued with the same mutations as well, suggesting it’s a crossbreed between its parent species and a shark.
The crocodile is just the beginning. Not only do the mutations get worse as they get further in but when the team comes across the old Mess Hall, they find evidence of human life long gone. Among them is a memory card. Upon being inserted into a camera we see the faces of Kane and another soldier seated in a chair. In his hand, Kane holds a knife and after asking if the man is okay, begins to cut open his stomach. The other soldiers around him hold him as he shudders in pain and when the skin of the stomach is lifted, his intestines slither around like snakes. Upon further exploration, they come across a wall embedded with his remains.
The plot thickens as we begin to understand what the Shimmer does to those who enter. They lose their minds and they lose their bodies as they become one with other life forms. They change until they become something else entirely. This is confirmed when after taking a sample of her own blood, Lena’s cells divide with the new daughter cell taking on the colorful shimmer resembling its environment.
It’s not until shortly after this that Sheppard is killed by what they identify as a bear.
It was noted in a YouTube video that the group begins to fall apart as soon as its most empathetic member dies. Which was an observation I didn’t notice. Sheppard was the quietest yet most emotionally in-tune character of the group. She spoke about the traumas of her members in a soft and understanding way. Without her grounding presence, mania begins to take over, particularly with Anya who becomes increasingly unstable as she begins to see the skin on her hands move. When she finds Lena’s locket containing a picture of her husband, she ties her and the rest of the group up and gags them.
We witness Anya in her final moments have a breakdown as she questions everything surrounding Cass’s death and even her own sanity. This is before she hears Cass’s voice from outside and runs out to meet… a bear whose roar mimics Sheppard’s last words begging for help. Anya’s death is brutal and gory so I’ll omit it for those of you with more sensitive stomachs. But the Scream Bear exemplified one of the more potent horrors of the Shimmer. Its ability to absorb the mind and screams of its victims and use their pain and fear to lure more left me with my jaw open, curled up on the couch terrified and confused.
Annihilation
Despite the explanations we’re given about the Shimmer, its nature remains inexplicable. We’ve witnessed trees growing like people, identical deer moving in perfect synchrony. Life forms corrupted beyond recognition. Life forms taking on characteristics of other life forms. It is baffling beyond words and understanding. Like the Shimmer itself, to explain it is to come up with a theory as corrupted and convoluted as it is. The end of the film throws you for another loop disregarding (or adding on to?) previous theories of mutations and DNA refraction when it introduces the idea of alien life.
With now two of their members dead, Lena continues on following behind Ventress into the lighthouse where she finds a charred body of a human sitting cross legged on the ground and a camera facing it. The footage once again contains her husband. He looks at the camera and admits to a loss of identity and a loss of sanity. He speaks to someone and tells them to find Lena before he sets loose the phosphorous grenade and a duplicate of Kane steps in front of the camera.
A horrified Lena turns to face the gaping black hole in the ground and follows the tunnel down into a prismatic room. When we see Ventress she is pitch black and her eyes are missing. It’s only when she looks at Lena is when she looks normal again. When she speaks, she speaks of an ‘it.’
“It’s inside us,” she says
“Our bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts until not one part remains.”
Ventress’s death is violent but unlike Anya and Cassie, it’s beautiful. She screams as her body disintegrates and explodes into a light show of greens, blues, and gold. I watched, horrified and mesmerized as her colorful remains converged into what looked like a prismatic eye with a bright hole in the center expanding until it engulfed Lena. I’m afraid for her. I want her to run but I’m curious enough to want her to stay. The thing takes a drop of Lena’s blood and replicates her, forming a humanoid, faceless being.
Finally, Lena runs up to the surface of the lighthouse to find her alien duplicate already there. We watch in horror as the creature mimics her every movement and an attempt to make for the door has the creature on top of her crushing her. The more she pushes the harder her duplicate pushes back until she collapses on the ground unconscious.
The mimicry of the creature feels like an infuriating, terrifying mockery as it attempts to copy Lena but ultimately refuses to allow her to save herself. The only interest it has is maintaining its own. Lena is simply a host to feed off of.
It’s not until she places the phosphorus bomb into the hand of her duplicate and sets it off that she is allowed to leave. When her duplicate is set aflame, it sets off a chain reaction as everything it touches burns around it. As the lighthouse is destroyed so are the crystalline trees that stand around it and the shimmery, translucent boundary fades away.
“I Don’t Know”
We cut back to Lena in the present day who is being questioned by a team of scientists. They allow her interaction with her duplicate to confirm their suspicion of the Shimmer being alien. But Lena remained quiet in response. They ask her what it wanted, commenting on how it was mutating their environment and destroying everything to which she replied that she didn’t think it wanted anything. She didn’t even think she knew it was there. That it wasn’t destroying anything, it was changing it.
I remember when I was watching this film I was constantly in a state of unease. Not because the Shimmer posed a violent threat similar to that of a war or an attack, but because I didn’t know. I kept trying to figure out what it was, what it wanted, why it was there, why it existed. Every answer I came up with to soothe myself was replaced and knocked down by another and another until I was forced to reckon with the possibility, the sheer terror, of never knowing.
The world of Annihilation has been subject to numerous interpretations and metaphors for cancer, the corruption of the Garden of Eden, the unknown, and change. But out of all of them, I agree with the last two the most.
To me, the Shimmer is the beast of the universe and the unknown shrunk down to a terrestrial level. Whether we acknowledge it or not, humans are surrounded by things bigger than we could ever begin to comprehend. Earth alone is full of natural mysteries and wonders that remind us of how small we are. Compared to the monstrosity of the universe and the possibility of life in it we are a speck of dust. Like the Universe, the Shimmer is unapologetic about its mystery and its ruthlessly changing nature. It doesn’t care if swapping DNA or Hox genes with another species scares you, kills you, or drives you mad, it does it anyway and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t even explain it. Everything you know down to your science, religion, and even your language is helpless against it.
It’s also a metaphorical take on the cruelty of life and time. Your whole world could be falling apart, you may stand terrified of the change that approaches, but time stops for no one. The sun will continue to rise in the east and set in the west and life continues apathetically marching on.
What’s scary about the Shimmer is that it draws no line between destruction and creation. It may not even know it’s destroying. But the four-month-long time period spent in its world wasn’t always that way. There was a beauty to its annihilation. The flowers, although mutated, were beautiful, as were the human trees. The boundary distinguishing the known and the unknown was beautiful. Dreamlike. The Shimmer reminds us that destruction is sometimes required for creation and that there is horror and beauty in both.
The last image of the film depicts Kane and Lena hugging for the first time since the beginning. Reflected in their eyes is a purplish glow along their irises. In the end, whether we fight it or destroy ourselves to escape it, annihilation/creation comes for us all.
Although I’ve tried the best I can to explain and dissect this film, you really won’t get the true feel for it unless you watch it. So please go do so. Thank you for reading Food For Thought. If you liked this piece please share and subscribe to support my work and receive free posts like this directly to your email every Saturday.