MOVIE: Annihilation (2018)

Annihilation
Year: 2018
Rating: R
Length: 115 minutes / 1.92 hours

While I’ve never quite been fully on board with the works of Alex Garland, I recognize there’s something about his movies that makes me want to see them, eventually. I appreciated his approach to Artificial Intelligence in Ex Machina (2014), but it took a while for me to get around to his next work, Annihilation (2018). His style of science fiction borders on horror, but more importantly, it emphasizes one philosophical question in particular. What makes us human? Instead of exploring the Turing Test as he did in Ex Machina, Annihilation focuses on the larger scale of the universe to answer this question.

Even if it takes a while to establish all the exposition, Annihilation does its best work in unraveling the mystery surrounding the return of Kane (Oscar Isaac). Most of this is done once the main character, Lena (Natalie Portman) arrives in the anomaly and can explore the bizarre alien effects on our world. The suspense that builds in step with the horror is well done and the Christopher Nolan-esque ending still had me scratching my head and trying to piece together what I had seen into a comprehensible answer.

Perhaps the closest parallel I have for this movie is Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy (2013). Some things define who we are, but how do we know if we’re the real us if there’s someone else who looks like us and moves like us? Is it just our personality that defines who we are as humans, or is there something deeper that others can’t mirror? How do we handle being replaced by an entity that surpasses us on several levels? While most of the answers to these questions are not directly stated in Annihilation, Alex Garland succeeds in fusing horror, science fiction, and philosophy into an entertaining package.

A psychological horror that asks what it means to be human, I give Annihilation 4.0 stars out of 5.