Annihilation (2018)

Directed and written by: Alex Garland

Starring: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson

I was mostly confused after watching Annihilation, so this piece of writing will be my attempt to make sense of it. The travel into the shimmer and its strange remixing of nature is inter-cut with the relationship between Lena and Kane, and Lena's affair with Dan. I wondered what the affair had to do with anything, and maybe the ending has the explanation for that. The Kane that arrived back at her house and kickstarted the whole movie was not technically the real Kane. The real Kane killed himself on camera with a phosphorous grenade. Early on in the film I remember talk about the ability for cells to copy themselves. The shimmer is a prism, a DNA reflector, bouncing around a little bit of everything into everything, but it can make copies too. Or maybe the creatures that live in the asteroid that crashed make copies and the DNA prism is just part of their atmosphere or how they live. I think that they need the prism to live seeing as Kane started to undergo organ failure when he left the prism and arrived on Lena's doorstep.

It would make sense that once Lena destroyed the lighthouse, the parts of Kane that are conflicting with his new human body burn away. There's no longer conflict and he is now a man. A new man. At the end of the film, Lena says that the creature that she killed was creating something new. I think that's a big clue as to why the affair is shown. This is a new Kane that doesn't have the memories of the original. This Kane doesn't know about Lena's infidelity. They can start anew. Also, that they both were exposed to the DNA remixing of the shimmer, they are something new themselves. The Adam and Eve of a new world. There's no guarantee that the shimmer's effects have been eradicated. What would happen if they now had a baby?

Dr. Ventress' cancer and what happens to her in the belly of the lighthouse confused me. It seems she was taken as a whole in order to create the creature that mirrors Lena. Is it because she had cancer and was willing to die? There's evidence that an individual's will does play a part in how this world affects you. Josie chooses to give herself over to the shimmer before Lena reaches the lighthouse and appears to have become one of the human shaped flowers. There's also the theme of self-destruction. There's a line about how the desire to self-destruct is programmed into every one of our cells. Ventress' cancer is her cells self-destructing, and she turns into a pulsating fractal ball of energy before Lena's mirror is created out of it from one drop of blood.

I like how the colours of the forest are muted. Due to the colour choices of the flowers and the fungus, there's an otherworldly element to them. Seeing these colours next to each other in nature, these particular shades is off-putting. That's why even with how beautiful the deer were, I could never feel comfortable with them or the landscapes. Maybe it was because of how dangerous this place is to our group of explorers, but I think it's that I recognise that there's something wrong with this picture. Maybe it has to do with it being on Earth. If they were in another dimension or on another planet, it would make sense. Here on our planet, especially knowing what the shimmer has been doing to all the humans that entered before, it's unsettling. It's just wrong.

At the end of this writing, I've worked out a couple of the idea strains floating around in my head regarding the film, but I'm still at a loss as to what it's trying to say. What the point of it was. There's a speech by Kane on the video recording. After spending time in the shimmer he starts to question what he actually is. Maybe we all are just a group of cells that can be easily interchanged, and that our identity is a fabrication. If that's the point, I can see why all the characters devolved into an existential nightmare. Destruction of the cell, destruction of the self. There might be something there.