One is purely the ideal form of a chair, while the other is a close resemblance with a “slight”. This is where Plato’s Ideal Forms enters, that is we have the chair and the one true form of the chair. Lena descends into the hole, only to be copied herself. One kills himself, while the other leaves. When she pops on the camera, she uncovers two of her husbands (Kane and a clone). She also discovers the charred remains of a soldier. As Lena finds the beach, covered with crystallized trees surrounding the lighthouse replete with the same type of white architecture that’d be found in 2001: A Space Odyssey, she discovers a camera by a black hole leading into the depths of the earth (reminiscent of The Last Jedi and The Ring). It’s difficult to delve into the film without picking apart that ending. In fact, I would say that Portman probably had the “weakest” portrayal of the cast, while Isaac seems to always make the most of the least (Kane is a man of few words with a random, but effective, Southeastern drawl), and Leigh is a no-emotion tunnel vision heat sinking missile of a bad ass. Surrounding this philosophical endgame are amazing performances from the cast, from Thompson’s subtle and quiet Josie, to Rodriguez’s shattered Anya, and Novotny’s balanced Cass. As the team pushes closer-and-closer to the lighthouse, Garland creates a philosophical rendering of Plato’s Ideal Forms.

Nevertheless, the final 25 minutes are what solidifies the film. This mood is doubled upon itself by the diffused camera effect, as though there is a color-hazed shimmer within the lens, and is juxtaposed by the grey-muted landscape of barren swamp. The fact that anyone who goes into the shimmer knows they’re going into a suicide mission, as teams have been going in for three years with no one returning, is abject Nietzschean Nihilism. That is, the organisms within the shimmer are conducting natural selection on speed. The fact that the entirety of the shimmer is a refraction, with species mutating and siphoning traits from one another is Darwinian. Instead, it’s the philosophies that surround their decisions, and in particular, the final 25 minutes that make the film. But it follows the pattern of what you’d expect in a Sci-fi when a bunch of dumb humans decide to inspect otherworldly events. Yea, bad shit happens (and there’s a fantastic scene with a bear that screams like a human).

The team’s objective is to reach the lighthouse, while Lena’s is to discover her husband’s fate.įor the most part, the team’s exploration of the shimmer is mundane. Ventress ( Jennifer Jason Leigh), Josie ( Tessa Thompson), Anya ( Gina Rodriguez), and Cass ( Tuva Novotny). Much of the film oscillates between Lena in a stark room debriefing Lomax ( Benedict Wong), and an all-female team of scientists who explore the shimmer: Dr. One of those teams has Kane ( Oscar Isaac), a soldier and husband of Lena ( Natalie Portman), missing for over a year in the shimmer. Team-after-team is sent in to study the phenomena never to return. Focusing on a comet that has impacted a lighthouse on the edge of a scenic coast, the film imagines an ever-expanding shimmer engulfing it.

In short, it’s probably too smart for the average viewer (and me too).ĭirector Alex Garland, owes much of the story to Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, Annihilation, and the film, Stalker, by Andrei Tarkovsky. When watching it, I thought it was part-Nietzschean, part-Platonic, part-Darwinian, part-Biblical, and an acid trip. I’ve got no idea what Annihilation was about.

Aniquilation filme