It took me a while to get to Anihilation.
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| Anihilation , 2018 |
The protagonist is Lena (just Lena… All the main characters in the movie are referred to simply by one name), a professor at Johns Hopkins’ school of medicine whose research focus is on the “genetically controlled cell cycle”. Cell cycle. Okay. She used to be in the army, which is where she met her husband, Kane, but it’s no wonder she left because she seems to not think very highly of the armed forces. That attitude is clear early on, when she is trying to get a clue about Kane’s next mission
KANE: We'll be under the same hemisphere. LENA: What does that tell me?KANE: It tells you that if you step outside and you look up... we'll be looking at the same stars.LENA: Holy fucking shit. You think that's what I do while you're away? You think I'm out in the garden, pining, looking up at the sky? Oh, to think my beloved Kane...is looking at the selfsame moon. KANE: Stop it. LENA: Oh, my distant celestial friend... ...please care for my brave soldier. KANE: Jesus. You know what? You are disrespectful, seriously, not only to your former comrades in the armed forces, but also to the president. LENA: You forgot the flag.
Eventually Lena Discovers that Kane’s top secret mission was an expedition beyond the Shimmer, a mysterious area of space that keeps expanding, and that is threatening to eventually swallow the entire world. The Southern Reach has been studying the phenomenum for 3 years. They sent numerous probes and human teams into the Shimmer. Nothing has ever returned.
I think there’s two ways to look at annihilation: one is to look at the character arcs and the other is to focus on the proper scientific aspects of the story.
The character arcs are air tight. Anihilation is first and foremost a story of broken characters. The mission of going into the shimmer to find out what is happening is possibly one that will save the entire planet eventually, and yet, this film is oddly lacking in heroes. The team of women that goes inside the Shimmer is entirely made of people who are desperately in need to be saved themselves. An addict, a cutter, a cheater, a grieving mom and a lonely cancer patient.
We are not aware of all these things when we first meet these characters, but as the truth about them unravels, everything sort of pieces itself together and it’s really nice to see the script take shape like that. It is possible that even the military men who went into the Shimmer before them were just as motivated by personal faults. The only one of them we get to know is Kane, Lena’s husband. He loves her, but knows she is cheating on him and not knowing what to do with that is what prompts him to volunteer for what is perceived not as an Earth saving assignment bit first and foremost as a suicide mission.
Ultimately the individual stories of each of those characters play a part on what happens to them inside the Shimmer. Everything that happens while they are there is, to a degree, a choice. Josie puts it very clearly when she says:
Sheppard's voice in the mouth of that creature last night. I think as she was dying, part of her mind became... part of the creature hat was killing her. Imagine dying frightened and in pain, and having that as the only part of you which survives.
When Sheppard was dying part of her mind became part of the creature, much like Sheppard’s daughter became part of her when she died. Not all of her. Just the dying, frightening part, which is why her mother eventually became one of the volunteers to a mission she doesn’t even believe in. In her own words:
I've been testing the magnetic fields around the boundary, which is like using confetti to test a hurricane.
Ventress who we later learn is slowly losing a battle to an invisible enemy – cancer – wants to face whatever it is that originated the shimmer. Josie wants to be a part of it. And Lena wants to fight it. Her confrontation with the shimmer is a mirror of her confrontation with herself. Her dissatisfaction with her marriage (linked to her thoughts about the army). Her guilt.
I had to come back I am not sure any of the others did
The fact that the characters are broken like this ties to another theme of the movie which is the idea of self identity and self destruction. In many ways, genetics and DNA play an important part in the story and thinking about genetics immediately brings up questions of identity. How much of is on our genes? Are we simply biological organisms whose entire make up is scripted in our chromosomes? Moving beyond the obvious traits of height, built, eye colour, skin tone,…Are personality, creativity, courage, hopes and dreams also written in our DNA? Or are those things we have control over? Is that control an illusion?
Anihilation addresses these questions directly towards the end of the movie, when Kane is seen talking to a camera while he holds a grenade:
I thought I was a man. I had a life. People called me Kane. And now I'm not so sure. If I wasn't Kane, what was I?
What is it that makes us who we are? Is it a job? A family? A purpose? Or something even more basic than that? Is it a body? Is it a name? The point is that is very difficult to define what is a human being and who someone is.. The difference between Kane and his clone holding the camera is blurred and that ambiguity is a fundamental part of the ending of this movie. Is Lena a clone or isn’t she? Is there really a difference?
There are many interesting concepts in this movie. The idea of different species mutating and merging together was pretty cool and allowed for extraordinary visual effects. The movie is visually striking. There were many interesting ideas, like plants growing in the shape of human beings, a mutant bear whose voice is actually an echo of the dying screams of his victims and multi-coloured colonies of lichens growing on the walls...
I do think however that the movie got a little lost trying to explain too much of it. There are wonderful pieces of dialogue like Lena’s conversation about cell senescence at some point in the beginning:
You take a cell, circumvent the Hayflick limit, you can prevent senescence. It means the cell doesn't grow old, it becomes immortal. Keeps dividing, doesn't die. They say aging is a natural process, but it's actually a fault in our genes.
That’s the kind of dialogue that doesn’t spoonfeed us anything of the story (althought it ties to the larger theme of self destruction and renewal) but provides interesting ideas… I could write an entire script around this simple concept of how what we taught ourselves to think of as a natural process is actually a fault in our genes. There are other lines of dialogue, however that are completely unnecessary. When Josie suggests that the plants are growing in human shape because they have Hox genes or her entire explanation about gene “refraction”… That’s the kind of over-explanation that would be better left out of the script. To paraphrase doctor Henry Morgan: Too-much explanation is to scientific verisimilitude what the cell phone is to conversation. It injures the very thing it wishes to help.
There are dozens of theories of what the shimmer was… A lab for alien beings to run experiments on Earth’s, a bubble of space that mimic their own environment so they could transition into a form that would allow them to inhabit this world (hence the duplicates), a gigantic alien being itself, hoping from world to world like a space parasite… And so many more ideas… Ultimately, though, I don’t think it matters. I think the idea that a movie can spark so many thoughts and theories and conversations is far more commendable than if it tried to tame the story into simply one of the many possibilities…
Anihilation / 2018 /
