Annihilation was an odd film. Much like Inception, the most lasting impression is the incredibly annoying music. A little of this alien thumping goes a long way, and it was pretty much constant.
Annihilation tells the story of a woman whose husband has gone missing. He’s in the military and a year or so ago he went off an on a secret mission. She tries to find out what happened, but no one will tell her. Until one night when said husband appears at home. At first she is overjoyed to see him, but then she is a little nervous, as he is acting strange. One thing leads to another and she is whisked away to a secret government compound just outside an alien zone, a thing they call The Shimmer. Cue annoying music…
One of the great tropes of Sci-fi Horror is meeting an enemy that we can’t defeat. Invasion of the Body snatchers falls into this genre, as does Prometheus and Covenant, where something attacks the human body from within. Annihilation takes the game up a notch and attacks not just humans, but everything within the Shimmer zone. So that everything is being Terra-formed into something else. Needless to say, none of these new life forms are friendly to humans.
The story is fairly simple. Our heroes go into the Shimmer in hopes of finding out what is going on and stopping it from changing the entire world, if they can. Much like the aliens in War of The Worlds, the solution ends up being a little on the simple side. But wait, there’s more!
Annihilation is part one of a trilogy, so we will have to wait for the next film, if there is a next film, to find out what happens.
The effects were good, but not great. They were all very clearly special effects. Some were better than others.
The acting was good and I liked everyone in the film. There were a couple of interesting found footage bits. I just kind of find it hard to believe that this whole region in Florida wouldn’t be missed by anyone. The point of origin is a lighthouse, on the ocean. We saw that the Shimmer was changing everything it touched, what about the ocean and all the things that might get too close to the shore? If they wanted us to believe the situation was contained, then it should have been set in Antarctic or in the middle of a desert.
Annihilation was good, just a bit confusing.
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