Movie Review: Annihilation – What was the question? Were you saying something? Huh.

Some stories encourage us to ask questions, but give no answers of their own.  Take Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.  While reading it was clear that the book is all about asking questions and not about giving one-size-fits-all answers.  The author even says so in some of his subsequent essays.  (Try to read answers that aren't there into that book and you just get mid-60's hippie communes passing around glasses of LSD-tinged water.  Yuck.)  Then some stories are all about asking the correct question.  For example, the film adaptation of Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life into Arrival is one.  While a bunch of .gov people are rushing around making things worse by demanding answers right-damn-now to the question "Are the aliens a military threat?" (to which the clear answer is "almost certainly not" – they're overwhelming and have the jump on us, yet are out in the open and trying to communicate) the main character in the story is asking "How do we talk with them?"  In the meantime, the overall story line asks "What are the ramifications of understanding alien ways of thinking?"  Good mind-expanding stuff.

Taking this one step farther, Jeff Vandemeer's book Annihilation seems to ask "What is this 'question' construct of which you speak?"  The... whatever the hell it is... is clearly more than just a mindless interstellar biological infection, but even the concept of 'question' doesn't really apply here.  Things just are.  And they are overwhelming.  By the end we see that all attempts to shape things into neat little human Q-and-A understanding have been defeated, and yet somehow human existence continues to exist.  The amazing thing is that the book trilogy pulls this off without devolving into formless obscurist crap.

The movie adaptation of Annihilation, while a heavy-handed attempt at a commercially viable film, keeps this central theme of the book alive.  For that reason alone we should thank the studio by buying a ticket and watching.  Because film is a visual medium, this skews the movie more toward the horror side in showing the changes the alien whatever is making.  That's understandable, though sometime hard to take.  But in the end, the basic story is preserved, and that is an increasingly rare thing.

Now for the down sides.  It really doesn't look anything like the St. Marks area.  For me that's a small disappointment, but I don't think many other people care.  The more serious problem is that some (though not all) of the adaptation is needlessly heavy, chopping out most of the biologist's motivating background here, randomly adding in an affair sub-plot there, etc.  It's another case of a screenwriter run amok: "I am the great screenwriter.  This is nothing but a well-regarded book, which I will now largely discard and replace with my own hack writing.  Now where did I put my crayons?"  This keeps happening, and the resulting movies that are marginally successful keep getting made.  Occasionally screenwriters are held in check, and in those cases we see great and financially successful movies like Lord of the Rings.  This movie skirts with that tar pit, mostly avoiding it but still taking a few sticky missteps.  At least the main themes of the original story were preserved.

So, bottom line?  Call it 3-minus out of 4 stars, for a B- effort.  Go see it if you want a quick sample of the New Weird without all the hassle of plowing through what can be fairly slow and content-thin reading.