Annihilation (2018)
Directed by Alex Garland
A biologist signs up for a dangerous, secret expedition into a mysterious zone where the laws of nature don't apply.
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41 films that influenced Annihilation
What critics say influenced Annihilation
Imagine Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” with a strong no-nonsense heroine and pulse-racing creature attacks, and suddenly, such an excursion starts to sound enticing for those who otherwise can’t abide slow cinema (or the kind of ontological concerns this movie raises).
Based on Jeff VanderMeer's novel, Annihilation slightly resembles Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), a highly artistic masterpiece from a much braver time, when audiences were less likely to balk at ambiguity.
Annihilation, which Garland adapted from the first novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy, is a riveting and often unnerving combination of head trip sci-fi on the order of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stalker and high-end, Ten Little Indians-style creature feature like Alien and The Thing.
Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker" also comes to mind, but one wishes Garland was more influenced by the latter than the former.
From the score that mounts from a recognizable, melodic charge to something that’s significantly less human, to cold and measured performances, to visuals that harken back to Stalker and Stanley Kubrick, but are decidedly Garland’s- the film is masterfully composed.
Reach” trilogy, is a riveting and often unnerving combination of head trip sci-?fi on the order of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stalker and high-?end…
And wait until you see the visually audacious, eye-popping, finale which unlike, say "2001: A Space Odyssey," a film Garland has clearly been inspired by, doesn't have the kind of heft it thinks it does.
Making significant (and justifiable) departures from the novel, the film resembles a cross between the jungle quest of Apocalypse Now and the interstellar puzzle of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Over its 115-minute journey, “Annihilation” steers a course from a brooding “Arrival” science fiction vibe into a kind of tense sci-fi/horror hybrid like Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” then finally to a kind of heady, hardcore science fiction of the “2001: A Space Odyssey” Stanley Kubrick variety.
This is legitimately unlike anything we’ve seen before in science fiction films, except maybe the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey .
In an opening shot that may as well be a direct quotation from John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” a meteor originating from deep space streaks past the camera, striking a lighthouse along the United States coastline.
Annihilation, which Garland adapted from the first novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy, is a riveting and often unnerving combination of head trip sci-fi on the order of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Stalker and high-end, Ten Little Indians-style creature feature like Alien and The Thing.
At an eerily deserted army base in the Shimmer, the women find traces of the group Kane had been with earlier, including scary footage and a dead body that has come apart and bloomed like a fungus, an image reminiscent of Rob Bottin’s designs for John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”
Combining bits of “The Thing” (the Carpenter version) and the “Aliens” franchise with themes reminiscent of “2001” and his own “Ex Machina,” writer-director Alex Garland offers an adaptation of the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy that’s consistently tantalizing but also deliberately obscure.
Annihilation is a ferocious, feral, female-centric update of fearsome monster classics like The Thing and Alien.
A journey into an alien heart of darkness, Annihilation feels like it’s been fashioned from gene-splicing Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now with John Carpenter’s The Thing (especially in a pool-set scene of blooming monstrousness) and, also, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, the latter’s spiritual influence coming to the fore during a finale of such prolonged, mesmerizing surrealism that it made my eyes burn—mainly because I didn’t want to blink, lest I miss a moment of its insanity.
…creature feature like Alien and The Thing.
Over its 115-minute journey, “Annihilation” steers a course from a brooding “Arrival” science fiction vibe into a kind of tense sci-fi/horror hybrid like Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” then finally to a kind of heady, hardcore science fiction of the “2001: A Space Odyssey” Stanley Kubrick variety.
Based on Tallahassee author Jeff VanderMeer�s novel, Annihilation on the surface is a dead-ducks mission like Alien with the Ripley factor times five.
Annihilation is a sci-fi film that works well as a straight-up horror film, much like Alien used a sci-fi premise to deliver the scares.
Annihilation follows the familiar form of science fiction horror found in films from Alien to The Cloverfield Paradox , with a cast of characters in isolation, slowly being picked off by a force they don’t understand.
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However, I can only hope that as time passes, those who were sorting derisively or scratching their heads will eventually come around and see the film as I did—as a conceptually ambitious and stunningly executed sci-fi film along the lines of such masterworks as “2001,” “Solaris,” “Blade Runner,” “Dark City" and “Inception” that will continue to live on long after today’s current chart-toppers have been long forgotten.
There are echoes of “Solaris” (both the Tarkovsky and Soderbergh versions), “Stalker,” “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing” in this movie, but it never feels like an assemblage of homage or too familiar, instead producing something wholly unique.
In these scenes, Garland operates with an economy and sense of emotional longing reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris.
Of course, Garland's film is much more than just an alien film, its ambitions would like you to think that it is about the meaning of existence, but it rather shares striking similarities to John McTiernan‘s "Predator" and James Cameron‘s "Aliens", two American-made sci-fi thrillers that have been relentlessly copied over the years by hundreds of filmmakers.
Years from now, someone’s going to stroll down the science-fiction aisle of the last remaining video store on the planet, where they’ll find the last remaining physical copy of Alex Garland’s new movie, Annihilation, shelved neatly between Aliens and Arrival .
Combining bits of “The Thing” (the Carpenter version) and the “Aliens” franchise with themes reminiscent of “2001” and his own “Ex Machina,” writer-director Alex Garland offers an adaptation of the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy that’s consistently tantalizing but also deliberately obscure.
They can’t all be Sigourney Weaver in Aliens.
As a team of heavily armed scientists, played by Portman, Gina Rodriguez , Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, march into The Shimmer, the otherworldly bubble walling off Area X, the movie conjures genre pleasures—shades of Predator, Aliens, Apocalypse Now—but it’s quieter, eerier.
He was in The Shimmer, of course, and it’s here that sci-fi fans may start to recognize the phantom impression of Andrei Tarkovsky’s deep-think genre classics, films like Solaris or Stalker, the latter similarly concerned with the traversing of a mysterious realm.
Even within this resurgence, rarely do you see a film that’s built from the templates of Tarkovsky films like “Solaris” or “Stalker,” movies that used sci-fi in a discomfiting, emotional register because, well, that kind of filmmaking is incredibly difficult to pull off.
To reveal Area X’s surprises would spoil the fun, but suffice to say that Annihilation has some overlap with Solaris and Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s ruminative and mind-bending portraits of surreal other worlds.
While there are passages of the body horror best exemplified by David Cronenberg’s films, there is more mirroring of movies by Andrei Tarkovsky in its cool pulse, especially the journeys into the unknown and into forbidden zones in “Stalker” and “Solaris.”
Like the novel, Garland’s film wanders uncertainly between the allegorical realm of Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” (1979) and “Solaris” (1972) and the viscid nightmares of H.P. Lovecraft.
Commercially, of course, it’s prudent to venture into avant garde science fiction territory on a smallish budget, the way Jonathan Glazer did with his truly disorienting and memorable 2013 alien visitation film “Under the Skin.”
In eerie moments, the film’s dreamy dark vibe reminded me of Jonathan Glazer’s challenging and chilling Under the Skin.
The past five years have seen two superb films about the utter foreignness of alien life forms: the crowd-pleasing Arrival , in which Amy Adams’ linguist ultimately decodes the spatter-based language of “heptapods ,” and the chilly and ungiving Under the Skin , in which Scarlett Johansson’s slinky extraterrestrial preys upon young men, the whys and hows as unknown as her name.
However faithful this movie might or might not be, what can be said is that this is pure science fiction and is as thought-provoking, intellectually challenging and as spiritually fascinating as anything that’s hit theatres this side of 2014’s Under the Skin or 2012’s Cloud Atlas.
There are shades of smart, risk-taking recent sci-fi films like “Under the Skin” and “The Fountain” in “Annihilation’s” DNA, and even hints of “mother!” in its environmental messaging.
Visually, the abstract movie is stunning, with its beautiful and hallucinatory VFX landing somewhere in between the cosmic Rorschach blots of “The Tree Of Life,” the eerie profiles of “Under The Skin” and a unique paroxysm of H.R. Giger and phosphorescent atoms.
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Making significant (and justifiable) departures from the novel, the film resembles a cross between the jungle quest of Apocalypse Now and the interstellar puzzle of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
At the same time, Garland has spliced a bit of DNA from Apocalypse Now into Annihilation – the sense of impending doom as Portman and her cohort wade through rivers and abandoned military bases and bodies is nothing short of fatalistic.
A journey into an alien heart of darkness, Annihilation feels like it’s been fashioned from gene-splicing Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now with John Carpenter’s The Thing (especially in a pool-set scene of blooming monstrousness) and, also, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, the latter’s spiritual influence coming to the fore during a finale of such prolonged, mesmerizing surrealism that it made my eyes burn—mainly because I didn’t want to blink, lest I miss a moment of its insanity.
As a team of heavily armed scientists, played by Portman, Gina Rodriguez , Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, march into The Shimmer, the otherworldly bubble walling off Area X, the movie conjures genre pleasures—shades of Predator, Aliens, Apocalypse Now—but it’s quieter, eerier.
It is a trip into the unknown like Apocalypse Now, with a literal trip down the river.
The recent film that Annihilation most resembles, in feel and ambition, is 2016’s brilliant Arrival.
In a setup reminiscent of “Arrival,” in which Amy Adams’ linguist finds herself at a military base established in the shadow of a strange and otherworldly and perhaps destructive something, Lena is taken to a secret government facility teeming with doctors, scientists and military personnel, all trying to understand and combat that inexplicable and expanding force in the woods, which seems to be on a course to consume and destroy the planet.
With Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve has emerged as an important name on this front, but right beside him is Alex Garland.
The past five years have seen two superb films about the utter foreignness of alien life forms: the crowd-pleasing Arrival , in which Amy Adams’ linguist ultimately decodes the spatter-based language of “heptapods ,” and the chilly and ungiving Under the Skin , in which Scarlett Johansson’s slinky extraterrestrial preys upon young men, the whys and hows as unknown as her name.
But that's also part of what makes it so compelling: much like Arrival, Denis Villeneuve's beautiful sci-fi starring Amy Adams, this is a movie to be experienced just as much as watched.
Alex Garland’s astonishing new movie owes at least some small debt to that sci-fi classic, but it also holds echoes of another more recent touchstone: 2016’s spooky-cerebral alien-invasion drama Arrival.