‘Annihilation’ is the best kind of ostracizing sci-fi out there

For a sci-fi auteur, “2001: A Space Odyssey” is the goal: create a film so bold, so ambiguous it remains iconic decades later. Often, however, the result is not a “Blade Runner” but something that evokes mix reactions. Think “Cloud Atlas” and “Interstellar.” Rest assured director Alex Garland’s sophomore film “Annihilation,” an adaptation of the first novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy, is not a bust, even if it doesn’t entirely recapture what made his last film “Ex Machina” such a provocative experience.

Hard science fiction is a tough sell. I’m talking discovery of the beyond characterized by a slow burn more than an intergalactic shootout. “Annihilation” is easily hard sci-fi, an incredibly smart film unworried about appealing to a broad demographic. Other big-budget blockbusters provide lavish sets and incredible production, but this one — beautiful as it is — concerns itself more with that special mystique the genre does best.

Things start simply enough with an unknown object crashing into a lighthouse. Cut to Lena (Natalie Portman), a cellular biologist mourning the loss of her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac). Suddenly, he’s in her home, acting peculiar, unaware a year has passed since they last saw each other. The reunion ends abruptly when he begins bleeding and convulsing. Eventually a covert group intercede, taking them both to a secret base.

Kane in a coma, Lena learns he’s been involved in a military operation investigating an anomaly expanding around that lighthouse. How he ended up at her place is a mystery, especially since no previous unit that entered the area came back. So the biologist, also a former military officer, joins the next expedition in search of a cure for her man.



Lead by psychologist Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an all-female team of scientists — no men or formal military personnel allowed — embark. Including a physicist (Tessa Thompson), geologist (Tuva Novotny) and paramedic (Gina Rodriguez), the team is slowly picked picked off, much like a horror film — not a spoiler since the film is a flashback, and Lena outright names two characters who die in an opening scene.

But this isn’t a horror movie or even a thriller, no matter how trailers tried to package the film (the mutated bear, however, will likely haunt me for months). It’s a mystery, the kind that unravels slowly with each new clue leading to the truth. And frankly, once all the cards are on the table, you’re not entirely sure what game you began playing in the first place. That’s fine by me; one of the greatest things I can experience at the movies is awe, and “Annihilation” has awe in droves. Sure, to a degree it tries to accomplish too much, but I appreciate a film that attempts something grandiose.

That’s probably why Paramount Pictures has so little faith in the “Annihilation,” worrying it’s “too brainy” and dropping it on Netflix for the international market instead of a normal theatrical release abroad. That’s hardly a surprise considering the sci-fi trash they produce like the “Transformers” and “Ninja Turtles” films and last year’s travesty “Ghost in the Shell.” With the exception of “Arrival” and “10 Cloverfield Lane,” brainy content isn’t a thing for the struggling studio.

“Annihilation” is a more ambitious film than his last: more themes, bigger cast, larger budget and an expanded story. It might lack to simplicity of “Ex Machina,” which earned an Oscar nom for screenwriting, but it sure knows how to get nerdy with some technical jargon and a final act I won’t soon forget, heightened by a musical score that transforms with that epic conclusion.

Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury are newer composers, but their work on both Garland projects is worth noting. Throughout the film, they overuse an acoustic guitar r

The implications were multi-faceted. But the work certainly underscored the rise of an “anything goes” art climate, in which specific movements were dead and the very definition of art was hard to pin down. Anything could be defined as art and so Rhoades threw anything he felt like into his last artwork. Like Marcel Duchamp before him, Rhoades seemed to claim what he did was art simply by virtue of his being an artist.

This is exactly where fashion finds itself today. We have entered a state of pure postmodernism, where anything goes and nothing means anything anymore.