Helplessly Hoping
Did the Annihilation movie faithfully follow events in the book? No. What does it all mean? I’m not sure. Would you see the movie again? Hell, yeah.
Director Alex Garland’s adaption of Annihilation (the first novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy) is only loosely based on the novel. Area X is a strange place encircled by a living, colorful, plasma-like bubble, surrounding a swampy coast wherein nature has gone weird and is beginning to edge out beyond the perimeter. Southern Reach expeditions have been sent in before to try to understand what’s happening there, but members of previous teams were killed or turned on each other or went missing or came back dying. Annihilation covers the 12th such expedition–this team made up of all women. The novel is brilliant and an example of the new or ecologically uncanny weird. The movie, too, captures that essence despite moving in a slightly different trajectory.
I felt that the novel was like a fever dream, a preternatural and surreal experience typical to what we see in weird fiction. Tropes of alien or haunted worlds are heavy within Area X–ghosts of previous expeditions, alien nature that doesn’t make sense biologically. Light refraction and time-loss suspend linearity and logic. But the background to the novel is something the author has talked about freely–his concerns about the destruction of our wild landscapes by such events as the Gulf oil spill. The novel is not didactic by any means, but if read with the author’s thoughts in mind–combined with discovering the shimmering and weird nature abundant within Area X–it’s hard not to come away with the feeling that we should consider the importance of our ecosystems before they are gone and become ghost lands. (In the novel, the biologist’s nickname is “Ghost Bird.”) Area X, both in the novel and movie, is moving and alive with stark and horrifying speciation and mutations, wherein plants and animals take on human characteristics. Alex Garland visually captures this strange wildness well. I got strong vibes of a scene from Michael Bernanos’s short story “The Other Side of the Mountain” and loved it.
Garland’s adaption continues this fever dream, if you will, and interprets it with a beautiful refashioning that I have an open mind about. Sometimes movies can be closer, word-for-word, to their novel counterparts, but when things are so mysterious and uncanny to begin with, a film-maker can become a separate artist bringing words to a visual stage through essence rather than fundamental translation. Though I was initially worried about Garland’s trajectory, by the end of my first watch of the movie, I was stunned and felt tied to the seat in awe. I went again two nights later with a bunch of friends and felt the same way. Later I told my husband the last time I had been so moved by such a visual and sound journey was when I was a kid and Dad took me to see a rerun of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The first ten minutes had me spellbound as an impressionable kid.
Casting is superb. Natalie Portman, who plays the biologist (given the name Lena in the movie), gives a strong performance throughout. As in the book, she has her little quirks and is far from perfect. She is frail and vulnerable in some ways. She is not faithful to her husband, played by Oscar Isaac, whose character is dark and mysterious. The song by Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Helplessly Hoping,” plays in the softer domestic scenes, in a house where the couple tries to stay normal despite the husband’s many trips abroad for the military. This song is so important to the movie, because the movie is about love, loyalty, and redemption. It’s about the kinds of horrors that come about when impulsive self-destruction happens–if not suicide–in life, love, and planetary existence/meaning. But Lena has a natural strong side to her and would go to the ends of the Earth (and does, so to speak) to find out what happened to her husband, who has come back from Area X but who is very ill. She owes him, she thinks.
Partial lyrics from “Helplessly Hoping” are:
They are one person
They are two alone
They are three together
They are for each other
This refrain represents how we humans are different in different situations. How if we are alone, we are one thing, and if together another thing, and if apart another thing. What happens if we are more than that? I had already caught on to the duplication and replication idea behind the song when I read VanderMeer’s Facebook, where he said that the song could be interpreted as cell division. I had to stop reading there because I didn’t want to repeat ideas, but “Helplessly Hoping” is a good choice of songs for the movie. The movie has strong undercurrents of love, redemption, and survival in this world where so much is uncertain and where ecosystems around us are diminishing. And it’s a sweet song that at least to me personally, a long-time fan of CS&N, rings with nostalgia.
The other cast members, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tuva Novotny, have strong performances as well. I was particularly thrilled with Rodriguez’s humor and madness and was glad to see Novotny’s warmth come through so well; it helped to curb the discomfort and horror from the rest of the movie. And Leigh, emotionless and tough, was just how I would have imagined the psychologist from the novel.
If “Helplessly Hoping” provides a comforting and familiar interlude that has us rooting for the biologist’s memories of happier days with her husband–and is central to a story where a woman enters a preternatural swamp with others to make up for her unfaithfulness and try to help her husband–then Moderat’s “The Mark,” does just the opposite, interjecting a discordant unease within Area X, especially in the last part of the movie, where the ultimate beautiful and yet frightening thing takes place in the lighthouse. I won’t say more about that. Only that it was awesome, okay?
Garland’s version of this piece of art takes us on a wild visual journey. I also appreciate the wilderness in the film–and am thankful to the author for bringing natural places into fiction; Garland plays with these ideas visually. My personal big take-away from the movie is that it captures the essence of human nature well. The movie is a mystery doused in the golden refracted light of love and survival. The 12th expedition to Area X has four women who have no reason to come back. It is, for them, a suicide trip. One has cancer. One has lost her child and husband. One mutilates herself, I assume by cutting, to feel alive. Another has seen so many expeditions go in, she needs to go herself if that’s the last thing she accomplishes in life. For the fifth woman, the biologist, however, she wants to find out what happened to her husband, and has reason to come back alive. The journey into Area X feels helpless, but hopeful just the same.
.png){kind=link}