Annihilation (2018)
5 of 10
It’s hard to imagine that a sci-fi movie featuring one of my all-time favorite actresses (Natalie Portman) and written and directed by the creator of
Ex Machina (which was very good, if strangely modest in scale), could turn out to be so disappointing.
Annihilation aspires to the genre of “philosophically provocative science fiction,” alongside the Russian film
Stalker, and
2001: A Space Odyssey, and
The Fountain, and the more recent but less majestic
Arrival. But it fails, utterly.
Hollywood writers seem to have forgotten that a story is driven by the characters: if you don’t care about the characters, your film will fail, no matter how heady or ground-breaking you
think your ideas are. A good story is a human adventure, first and foremost. So I knew this film was in trouble when the main character played by Natalie Portman, seemed distant and unfamiliar as the story progressed. And her marriage is a major theme in the story, but we don’t care about that either. Or her husband. Or anyone else on screen. They’re all just mechanisms to serve a purpose. None of this is on the many talented actors involved – they had nothing to work with in the script.
Apparently we’re supposed to overlook this, and be dazzled by the strangeness unfolding in the story. The problem is, the strangeness unfolding in the story isn’t really that strange, or even particularly interesting. Weird mutated plants and animals, okay, whatever.
Then the climax arrives, and it seems labored and pointless, and overly self-conscious. Oh look – this is supposed to be interesting because of the symbolism. Okay so what is the symbolism saying? I don’t know, but it’s supposed to be deep. But it doesn’t seem to be very deep. Maybe I’m not deep enough to “get it.” Could be. But I still don’t care.
Now we’re at the twist ending. How did that happen? I don’t know; it wasn’t shown, or explained. But it’s deep…it must be, right? I wish I cared.
And now it’s over. That was disappointing. I think there was supposed to be a point.
So I tried to read a couple of the reviews, written by the kind of people who love to rake over the philosophical implications of otherwise boring movies. And they seem to be very favorable to this film. And yet I still don’t care, because the story and the characters weren’t interesting to watch, and trying to make them interesting after the fact feels like scrounging for the crumbs at the bottom of a bag of potato chips: it wasn’t satisfying to begin with – the crumbs aren’t going to change that.
If you’re looking for a boring film to talk about at parties to see who the most pretentious film student in the room is – because they’ll love to get animated about the philosophical motifs and leitmotifs of this story – then this is your ticket.
But for my part, I wish I could just slap the jackasses who lifted this up to an 88% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, because their idiocy cost me of 2 hours of my life.