Director: Alex Garland
Starring: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny, Benedict Wong, and Oscar Isaac
Rated: 14A
Running Time: 1 Hr, 55 Mins
Movies are art. They can take you to the furthest reaches of the universe and virtually anywhere in time. They can explore new worlds or present new questions about our own. They can test the limits of our imaginations and challenge our notions of reality.
But they’re also a business.That was a painful lesson every one involved in last year’s Blade Runner 2049 (my favourite sci-fi movie of 2017) learned. Despite doing a lot of things right, its considerable running time and slow pacing scared audiences away in droves and Warner Bros. didn’t even come close to breaking even on the expensive investment (2049 carried a reported price tag of over 180 million dollars before advertising ad promotion).
It’s a lesson Alex Garland should have paid attention to while creating Annihilation.
Video: Paramount Pictures
Biologist and military veteran Lena (Natalie Portman) has spent the year since her husband (Oscar Isaac) disappeared on a covert military mission having all her efforts to find out what happened rebuffed by the military. Until he shows up at their home unannounced. But their reunion is short lived after he collapses and is soon confiscated by the military. After being abducted, Lena wakes up in a secret military base called the Southern Reach, which lies on the outskirts of “The Shimmer,” an alien bio-sphere that is slowly expanding and consuming everything around it.
All attempts at communicating with and exploring The Shimmer have failed (and until Lena’s husband mysteriously appeared on her door, no one had ever returned from it either). Lena joins a team of scientists lead by Dr. Ventress (Jenifer Jason Leigh) with the intent to venture to the heart of The Shimmer and collect as much information as possible. Every mystery the team confronts leads to more questions and their mission soon turns into one of pure survival.
I was really pumped for Annihilation. A bestselling book adapted by Alex Garland (who brought us Ex Machina) with an impressive cast, what was not to like? While I had been hoping for something along the lines of Arrival, The Martian or the aforementioned Blade Runner, I have no idea what I got but. But it was neither entertaining or satisfying.
I don’t have any problem with a slow burning story, as long as there’s an impressive payoff at the end. Whether that’s a surprise twist, a false finish or an unexpected yet impressive action sequence, as long as my patience is rewarded I’m pretty progressive when it comes to a movie taking it’s time to set it’s narrative table.
But when that movie is all slow-burn and doesn’t answer or even acknowledge any of the questions it poses, then I’m going to consider my time wasted. And that’s Annihilation’s biggest crime.
The movie plods along for nearly two hours, posing questions and presenting both the characters and audience with mysteries it has no intention of answering. It teases emotional backstories for the characters (Lena’s strained marriage for starters), but offers little else. Significant events happen and then are ignored later. Important questions are forgotten just as soon as they’re asked.
And the pacing doesn’t help either. Garland doesn’t just keep it slow, but he seems to mirror the pace of a book. And while that crawl may work for a novel, which has a lot more time to unspool its story and develop its characters, it’s the antithesis of a visual medium like movies.
Annihilation comes across as very high brow but forgets to be practical. There is no urgency for the film’s climax, which feels flat and fails to resolve anything. If anything it suffers from the wrong format; if this was the approach it wanted to take it should have gone the Netflix route (between four and six one hour episodes should have done the trick) instead of a two hour movie.
Annihilation seems so preoccupied with trying to be artistic (with very dubious results) that it totally forgets that it also needs to put and keep paying butts in seats. At the end of the day, there is very little in Annihilation that justifies the price of admission. And if a movie ends up on the wrong side of a Profit And Loss statement, it’s going to be considered a failure no matter how smart it thinks it is.
Image: Paramount Pictures
