Annihilation, 2018. Alex Garland.

Last night I watched the film Annihilation. It’s been a couple of weeks since it was released on Netflix, but I always think you have to find the right time to watch an Alex Garland film. I enjoyed watching The Beach, and was simply stunned by 28 Days Later. I read somewhere that he had a big impact on the film Dredd, which is a highly underrated film in my opinion. Ex Machina, his previous film looks closely at the relationship between mankind and artificial life, which certainly left me questioning my own existence. He is a great writer and director, and definitely knows what questions to ask his audience.

let’s get down to it, and Just a quick reminder that from now on there will be spoilers. At the start of the film, we see a meteor descending into Earth, finally crashing into a lighthouse. We are introduced to the character Lena, Natalie Portman. Lena is a cellular biologist, who is trying to come to terms with the disappearance of her husband and soldier, Kane, Oscar Issac. Twelve months after his disappearance, Lena returns home to start painting the bedroom she shared with her spouse. Back at home, her husband appears on the landing, looking deeply confused. Kane can’t remember anything since he last left, and he is suddenly taken ill. This is where the story really starts to get going, as Lena and Kane are intercepted as they travel in the back of an ambulance. They are both taken to Area X, near to the lighthouse where the film began. In a camp, Lena is briefed about an unknown area called the shimmer, and told her husband is the only person ever to return. Lena volunteers, along with psychologist Dr. Ventress, physicist Josie Radeck, anthropologist Cass Sheppard and paramedic Anya Thorensen to enter the shimmer. Inside they hope to find out what had happened to the previous team, and learn more about the anomaly.

I am going to write about the final part of the film a little differently now, as I want to talk about how this film made me feel. Also, if you haven’t watched this, I wouldn’t want to spoil a second of it for you. First of all, it’s beautiful, and second, it’s as dangerous as hell. Everything we know about life itself is completely turned on its head in the shimmer. Time, nature and humanity are put into a washing machine and left on fast spin overnight. I had thoughts of old hippies witnessing the same visions in the desert in the sixties, after consuming copious amounts of LSD. The story leads to the lighthouse, and Lena finally gets the chance to see what happened to her husband. I thought the ending was beautiful, thought-provoking and scary. Only because it made me realise just how incredible and vulnerable life is. However, It really does make you think a lot, and I will need to watch it a few more times before I can actually grasp what the film is trying to tell me. This film has everything a modern film viewer should want to watch. Alex Garland has created a film that I compare with some of the pioneers from the early seventies and eighties. It had some elements in the film that took me back to those early movies, such as Alien and Star Wars, along with some of the greatest horror movies of the past. I can’t tell you how much of a great film this is with words alone, you need to witness it for yourself.

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