Metaphors decoded

 

Welcome to the Shimmer, earthling!

So I watched "Annihilation" from 2018. Or most of it. A Swedish TV/movie site claimed that it´s the most scary horror story ever made, et cetera. Naaah. Not by a long shot. In fact, I´m almost tempted to call it false marketing.

A mysterious alien presence takes over a territory in the United States. Patrols sent out to scout the area disappear after first going mad. Four women volunteer for a new mission to this scariest location on planet Earth. So what do four women, one of them a former US army soldier, talk about on an extremely dangerous expedition to the potentially deadliest place this side of the Andromeda Galaxy?

Why, their family relationships and former boyfriends, of course! 

Something tells me "Annihilation" couldn´t pass the Bechdel-Wallace test...

The women are weak, too weak for a realistic mission of this kind. In film like this, the actors should be manly macho men. Or female Israeli commando soldiers (hint hint). Maybe I´m missing some clever psychological metaphor. And oh, the mutant bear looked like the next cousin of the monster from "Prophecy" (a half-forgotten film from 1979).

But sure, there are some interesting angles here and there. The alien presence is called the Shimmer. It´s not clear what it wants, or even want something at all. The Shimmer has turned a wildlife refuge in Florida into a surrealist landscape that looks like a Salvador Dali painting. It´s actually quite beautiful, but also dangerous. People who enter the Shimmer get disoriented, suffer memory loss, or die under strange circumstances. The Shimmer expands (albeit slowly) and could potentially annihilate all life on the planet. During the dramatic finale, we realize that the alien quasi-intelligence can "download" our genetic signatures and memories, creating crude body doubles of real people. 

And maybe *that´s* the key metaphor of "Annihilation". The Shimmer is really a symbol of the Internet, AI and robots. It´s superficially beautiful (like AI-generated art), yet illusory and mechanical. Everything feels "wrong". The alligators are white, the plants form impossible hybrids, some even look humanoid. The Shimmer turns us into robotic copies of ourselves, incapable of real relationships. And just like the Internet, the alien entity is quasi-intelligent but lacks a real purpose. It spreads like a computer virus in automatic fashion. Indeed, that´s how the main character Lena eventually manages to destroy the Shimmer: by making it mimicking an explosion, something the mindless system does until it self-destructs.

Or maybe not...

Three stars for this production. But no more.