Alan Rapp

• Title: Annihilation
• IMDb: link

I love Ex Machina (enough to name it my favorite film of 2015), but holy hell is director Alex Garland‘s follow-up project a clusterfuck. Based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation focuses on a biologist and former soldier (Natalie Portman) who chooses to journey into a rainbow-curtain rift (referred to as a shimmer) with four other female scientists (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tuva Novotny, and Tessa Thompson) in hopes of understanding what is happening inside and what the anomaly did to her husband (Oscar Isaac) who was the only soldier sent from any of the previous expeditions to make it out alive.

Although hardly original, the film starts out with an interesting enough premise. Some of this is fulfilled within the group’s early moments inside the altered reality, although the existence and nature of it also creates several of the film’s biggest plot problems. Existing and expanding for three years, viewable by satellite, radar, and the human eye, and having swallowed up whole towns that had to be evacuated, we are led to believe the somehow the military has kept the existence of this anomaly secret from the world the entire time? Seriously?

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