Annihilation

Facing "the Glimmer" : Annihilation

Alex Garland's Annihilation is a more than decent Sci-Fi film that suffers from a clunky first act. Happily, the film improves as it goes along and offers a smidgen of character development and a chunk of visual splendor. Natalie Portman stars as a veteran whose husband's Special Forces unit has disappeared into a mysterious alien orb, named the Glimmer,  that is expanding on the Southeast Atlantic coast. Portman is implausibly roped into a suicide mission with an all female crew to investigate the glimmer. The crew is picked off, And Then There Were None style, but not before each actress relates the trauma that propelled her into the mission. Since the crew has thesps like Tessa Thompson and Jennifer Jason Leigh, this unfolds well, though Gina Rodriguez botches her big moment.

The Glimmer is a zone of strange genetic splicings and mutations. Sometimes the CGI resembles a bad progressive rock album cover, but Garland and crew largely capture a vision of an alien nature that is both wondrous and terrifying. A novelist, Garland has displayed both here and in Ex Machina that he has a firm grasp of the themes underlying fantasy and horror. He has not displayed that he is a natural filmmaker, but Annihilation continues to display his promise, if not his skill at execution. (6/24/18)