2018 • R • 1h 55mins • Watch trailer • Rent it
🍿In-Theaters Tie-In: Civil War is playing, but what else did that guy make?
You’re reading Pizza & A Movie. You walk into your pizza joint and the air smells like bubbling cheese. You pick up your pie and ask the guy at the counter, “Hey, what should I rent to go with this?” Tonight he says, “You ever see the one where Amidala fights alien plants?” That’s not much to go on, but I think he means director Alex Garland’s Ex Machina→ follow-up, Annihilation. We’re popping in the tape.
Here’s the plot. Biologist Lena (Natalie Portman) doesn’t know what to do. Her partner, Kane (Oscar Isaac), came back from a mysterious mission after being missing for a year. First he’s weirdly off, then starts leaking blood like an Overlook Hotel elevator. They head to the hospital but wind up at a government facility called The Southern Reach, which is not a good name for anything. Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who seems to know a lot more than she’s letting on, says Kane’s dying. Ventress reveals that Kane and his team went into Area X, a region just beyond The Southern Reach encapsulated by a shimmering rainbow dome. He’s the only one who came back.
Ventress preps another team to go in, inviting Lena along. Lena, hoping to find something in Area X to cure Kane, accepts. Ventress, Lena, Anya (Gina Rodriguez), Josie (Tessa Thompson) and Cass (Tuva Novotny) pass through the border. What they find is a land filled with strange flora and not-normal fauna. The answers they’re looking for may be in the lighthouse in distance. But will the team survive the terrain in between? Can they rely on each other as Area X begins to change them? And what’s Ventress really up to anyway?
It Started as a Book
You really remember Annihilation’s visuals. So how’d we get this painting of a movie? It actually began as a book.
In ’14 writer Jeff VanderMeer, 46 at the time, published a novel titled Annihilation. Guy actually wrote three books’ worth of story—Authority and Acceptance hit bookstores within eight months. Think of it as bingable fiction. I read 'em and liked Annihilation the best. My 2¢? Entries two and three serve up more if you’re still hungry, but Annihilation is a full meal all on its own.
VanderMeer writes in a genre they call New Weird. You know when books are new, but also weird? New Weird. Our postmodern times make a lot of critical, ironic art but rarely does it veer non-literal. Might be snarky but it is what it is. New Weird keeps you guessing about its realness like a prankster overly acquainted with H.P. (Harry Potter, probably?) Lovecraft. Enjoy being able to picture what’s happening as you read? New Weird will have your brain’s eyeballs flitting between two or three unreconcilable mental images.
Before Annihilation even hit shelves, Paramount Pictures bought the rights. The project passed into the hands of producers Scott Rudin and Eli Bush, who’d just worked with Alex Garland on his directorial debut, Ex Machina→. Their wily robot picture was chockablock with unreliable characters, skepticism about humanity’s humanity, scientific detail and Oscar Isaac. Rudin and Bush asked Garland to bring all that to Annihilation. In October of ’14, a couple months before Ex Machina→ hit theaters, Garland signed on.
Look, I’m no screenwriter.
I don’t know how to turn a novel into a movie.
But if you made me guess, I’d say read the book a few times, extract an outline, study characters and themes, then bang out a script that ties it all together. Garland? Didn’t do that. He read the novel once, then tossed it aside. Wrote a script reflecting his hazy memory of the book and his vibe reading it. Did he read the sequels? Nope. Reread the first book? Nope. I guess weird fiction deserves weird adaptation. He asked VanderMeer if it was okay to mess up his novel and VanderMeer said yep. Maybe VanderMeer trusted Garland because Garland started out as a novelist himself. Maybe VanderMeer saw free marketing for his books. Maybe both.
TL;DR: Weird writer writes a weird novel, weird director writes a weird screenplay, makes weird movie. It’s weird all the way down.
Book vs. Movie
Book
👤 Characters don’t have names, just jobs
👩🔬 Biologist gets superpowers
🗺️ Geography is clear and important
💁♂️ Husband and whole team return but all die of cancer
🧟 Weird creature is at the bottom of underground stairs
Movie
👤 Characters have first and last names
👩🔬 Biologist is normal person
🗺️ Geography is garbled and irrelevant
💁♂️ Husband only returns, mostly dies, suddenly is fine
🧟 Weird creature lives in a lighthouse like an Airbnb
Here’s VFXin’ at You, Kid
Annihilation reunited producers Rudin and Bush and director Garland. But Garland also brought back most of his production folks from Ex Machina→, including visual effects studio DNEG. Good thing, because Annihilation’s VFX could have been overwhelming. The workload entailed HDR-izing most shots and adding Area X’s alien foliage to scenes. But effects artists also had to build the mutant bear and the alien entity at the end. How’d they make ‘em?
Let’s talk bear. Area X blends decomposition and vibrance, so the bear had to look sick, rotten, vulnerable, but dangerous too. VFX Supervisor Andrew Whitehurst says they “took a human skull model, a bear skull model and mashed them together in 3D.” Gross. But is that why those bear attack scenes work so well?
The answer is animatronics. The actors seem scared to death because they went toe-to-toe with a scary-looking animatronic bear during shooting. From Whitehurst: “On set we had a puppeteered animatronic head and neck that was used for close up interactions with the cast, like when the bear nuzzles Radek. It had hoses fitted so it could exhale and blow the hair of the characters which really helped sell the interaction.” Learned a little something from Roger Rabbit→, didn’t they?
Digital artists painted out the on-set bear and composited in a painstakingly designed digital version. Sounds like a lot of work for a mushy bear, but that’s the business.
The alien entity in the final act also came from Whitehurst’s DNEG team. You know how sometimes you’ve had a hard day making a complicated mutant bear? We’ve all been there. So you unwind by studying 3D fractals and procedural geometry? That’s what they did.
The undulating inside-out orb Portman’s character stares into is based on the Mandelbulb, first modeled in ’97. Explaining it takes a lot of math your pal typing here doesn’t understand, but I get that it’s a 3D expression of the Mandelbrot set, math that describes a recursive 2D fractal structure. Makes more sense when you see it:
In Annihilation, the effect works. Nature contains many fractals, but no infinite fractals. The Mandelbulb alien we see undulates eerily through subsets of itself forever and ever and ever. It’s not from nature. We never grasp its true form. We see it but can’t understand it. Though nothing like this can be found in VanderMeer’s novel, the spirit of DNEG’s creation is very true to the source material’s effect on the reader. It bugs your brain out hard.
Of course, building a mutant bear and a Mandelbulb alien wasn’t but the work of a moment. DNEG wrangled something like 250 people to get it all done. From screenplay to wrap took nearly three years.
How to Watch an Alex Garland Movie
While talking to newshounds vis-à-vis his new flick Civil War, Garland framed his movies as “conversations”. He said, “What I’m usually doing in films is presenting more than one opinion, so it’s more like a conversation… [But] I’ve tried to do it in a way that isn’t interrupting the conversation.” Right on, but how does a viewer join the conversation?
I think it works like this. Don’t sweat talking. We’re eating.
A Garland flick like Annihilation or Ex Machina→, as I said, is a full meal. There’s a reason it’s being served, but you’ll have to eat through entrees, fixings and sides to understand to it. Don’t get too full on any one thing or you’ll miss it. Ex Machina→ seems like it’s about AI, but get too distracted by that and you’ll miss what it has to say about gender. Load up on Annihilation’s painterly wide shots and you’ll miss its notes on grief.
Garland Themes Checklist
✔ Women create through curiosity, men destroy through frailty
✔ Beware folks who get too into politics or science
✔ Nature doesn’t care what we do
✔ We’re each alone, ultimately
✔ Don’t trust dudes
[Rolling up sleeves sounds]
Lemme take a swing at the big theme.
I think Annihilation is about grief. I think it says grief is everyone’s personal Area X. Grief disintegrates you, reforms you as something new. Like our characters, you can study grief, fight it, get attacked by it, disappear into it, or engage with it and pass through it.
It’s change we’re really afraid of—change we didn’t pick. Fear that a new self is coming, and they won’t be you. They will look like you, but they’ll be someone else. But as Ventress says, “Isn’t the self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?” I think Garland’s saying we self-destruct to evolve. Lena says, “It’s not destroying, it’s making something new.”
What does it mean that the meteor struck the lighthouse? Seems like an alien invasion of safety and orientation. Nobody chooses for a trauma rock to hit their own personal lighthouse. But that’s where they always land.
Here’s a take. I think Garland made a trilogy. Ex Machina→, Annihilation and Civil War unite as what I’ll call his Change Trilogy. Change is inevitable, then scary, then necessary. As a trilogy they asks if humanity even should survive. Is our world better off after we beef it? After we self-annihilate? Hopefully not, but only if we keep asking ourselves that question.
To literally answer my section heading, how to watch a Garland flick should be on the biggest screen you got. He composes theatrical shots—tiny players in giant settings. Don’t watch this on your phone while you do the dishes like I did. You just … well, you miss stuff.
Box Office Annihilation
How did Annihilation go over in ‘18? Did it slowly yet meaningfully disintegrate audiences?
Critics liked it, audiences didn’t.
Annihilation opened in mid-February—not a vote of confidence from Paramount. In its first weekend it made $11M, which used to be peanuts, and slotted into fourth place. It went on to scrape together $33M in the States for a worldwide total of $43M against a budget north of $40M, not counting marketing costs. It lost money. Folks went to see Game Night→ and Black Panther instead.
Critics highlighted its finer features: trippy visuals, an ambiguous ending and fearless weirdness. All the stuff the friend you dragged to see this would have hated about it. The Chicago Sun-Times called it “a masterpiece”. Rolling Stone called it “a bracing brainteaser with the courage of its own ambiguity”. Paramount called it “coming soon to Netflix”, which was their way of making some bucks back on a bad investment. It hit streaming services mere weeks after its theatrical debut. Like the novel, Annihilation wasn’t for a general audience.
Garland made Men ('22) after this. It came out during the pandemic, was seen by no one and basically doesn’t exist. Never seen it. Don’t know much about it, though I hear it’s got something to do with, hang on, checking my notes … men? Not sure. Might be good! Who knows.
Alex Garland’s Last Movie Ever
Civil War, which Garland says is his last movie ever, is in theaters. (Fact Check: He’s currently got two more projects in the works, at least one of which he’s directing.) I saw it opening weekend. If you go in with an open mind, I think you’ll like it. What you won’t do is expect it. Though trailers kinda make it look like election year partisan-bait, it just follows four journalists in a Ford as they drive through war-torn America.
I really think you should see it.
As a rule I don’t cover things from this year, whichever year “this year” is at the time. You gotta have rules. It’s one of the vanishingly few ways in which I am exactly like a Jason Stratham character. Mainly, picking a now-playing flick would wreck my premise. You can’t carry a pizza into a theater. And sneaking one in is very, very hard.
But I’ll bend my rule to say that Civil War is excellent. Seemingly complex but ultimately simple. Very much about cameras, observation and intervention. It’s Garland’s most accessible movie yet.
And I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
Hope you enjoyed this one! I hadn’t gone back to Annihilation since it came out. Didn’t like it then. Found it a gorgeous, full meal to chew on now. This one really sticks in your brain.
If you liked this, share it with a pal who would too! Take ‘em into Area X with you.
And go see Garland’s Civil War while it’s still in theaters! It’s much more accessible than this. And it’s not what you’re expecting, either.
Notes:
For real the novel is so good. Please go read it. Beautiful cover art too!
Annihilation makes Ex Machina→ look like an accessible popcorn movie.
The acoustic guitar passages are weird. Are they for when Lena feels a big feeling? Contrast them with the alien bwhahhh tonal tracks at the end when her humanity is gone.
In Big Hero 6 (’14), the wormhole Hero goes inside at the end is the interior of a Mandelbulb.
Annihilation’s mutant bear walked so The Last of Us’s Rat King could run.