Originally written March 2, 2018

Man…Annihilation. I had such high hopes for this movie. Director Alex Garland debuted a few years ago with Ex Machina, one of the best sci-fi movies of the past decade. So, seeing that Annihilation would be his next movie, I got really excited. Plus, the trailers for it were completely intriguing. I figured we’d have yet another hit on our hands. It’s not that Annihilation is bad…it’s actually really good at times. I’m hoping Garland’s career doesn’t follow that of Neill Blomkamp, who received massive praise for his debut sci-fi movie District 9, and then had less stellar movies with Elysium and Chappie. Those movies weren’t bad, just not amazing like people wanted them to be. For me, Annihilation is to Alex Garland as Elysium was to Neill Blomkamp.

Much like the other big sci-fi movie of February 2018, The Cloverfield Paradox, Annihilation actually has a really intriguing concept; it just doesn’t deliver well enough on it. A biologist named Lena is struggling in her personal life. Her husband went off on a military mission a year ago, and never returned home. However, then he randomly shows back up at home, being a completely different person than he was when he left. His organs start to fail, and so Lena starts to realize that she needs to go into the area that her husband was at to see what happened to him. Along with four other women, Lena embarks into the dangerous zone, an area where the laws of nature don’t apply. She then begins to discover some disturbing truths about what happened.

Annihilation was one of those movies where my opinion of it kept wavering throughout the entire thing. Even now, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it, so my score of it is just going to be arbitrary. What’s determining my score is how I felt about the movie by the end of it, which was positive. However, the experience of getting there is a mixed bag. For the most part, the movie gets better as it goes. I really wasn’t into it that much for the first half, but then I thought the second half was amazing. It’s really weird.

It’s easiest to just go over the good and the bad. I’ll talk about the bad first, since it’s more problematic in the first half of the movie. So, I think the worst thing that Annihilation has going for it is its characters. The only one that really feels developed is Lena, with everyone else being either throwaway or uninteresting. Seriously, with the group of five women that go on the mission, I knew them as “Lena, the psychologist, and the other three.” I also found the movie to be unnecessarily confusing at times. I had looked up information about the movie afterwards, and there were certain moments in the movie that really weren’t presented clearly that you have to look into online for clarification. I always think that’s unacceptable. Some movies think they need to present things in a cryptic way to create mystery, but this can really backfire when the movie becomes confusing because of it.

So, with the good…for a lot of the movie, I thought it was the “big moments” that were where the movie really shined, with the in-between stuff being really boring. When new discoveries are being made, the movie is really interesting. It’s just the character moments that drag the movie down. However, as the events of the movie start to unfold towards the end, things really pick up, and I’d say that the last third of the movie is excellent. I feel that Annihilation could have been on the same level as Ex Machina if the earlier stuff in the movie was as good as the end stuff. There’s one horror scene in a house that is the best scene of the movie by far. I also really liked the climax. These moments provide a really unique experience, and give me the kind of movie that I wanted it to be from the beginning. The other big praise that I need to give to the movie is that it’s beautifully directed. The visuals look absolutely stunning. There’s so much personality and atmosphere to the world that the characters are in, it’s just that this intrigue isn’t capitalized on enough. However, the world itself looks equally creepy and beautiful, and it’s very hard to strike that balance properly.

Like I said, keep in mind that my score for this movie is kind of arbitrary, because my feelings on the movie are so mixed. I think the movie is more in my good graces than bad only because it really redeems itself in the end. It’s just disappointing, because a good (maybe great) movie could have been an amazing movie. All the movie really needed to do is make its character moments as compelling as its world-building/intrigue moments, and then the movie would have held my attention all throughout. All in all, Annihilation definitely isn’t a disaster, it’s just an inferior second outing from director Alex Garland. Hopefully he can deliver something as excellent as Ex Machina in the future, because Annihilation didn’t quite make the mark.

4/5