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| Two hens watch Annihilation together |
Annihilation
Directed by Alex Garland
2018
Ms. Hen wanted to see this film when it came out in theaters
earlier this year, but it was out for such a short time, she didn’t see it. She
prefers to watch movies at home and not in the theater, so she can do what she
wants when she watches them, and can have privacy instead of being squished and
trapped in a theater for hours.
Ms. Hen rented this the first week it came out, and she was
dazzled. This is a science fiction movie with mostly female characters, which is
extraordinary because these types of films usually consist of primarily male
characters. Ms. Hen loved that these women were going into the shimmer to help
discover what happened and what the shimmer actually is.
Natalie Portman’s character, Lena, is a scientist, and a
former member of the army. Her husband, also a member of the army, disappears
for a year, and when he comes back, he tries to explain how he can’t tell her
what happened and where he was. He gets sick, and she calls an ambulance, and
they are intercepted by what seems to be military. Lena discovers that he was
in the shimmer, trying to find out about it with an expedition.
Dr. Ventress explains to Lena what the shimmer has done to
the area, and how nobody comes out of it the same, if they do at all. The
doctor is heading a search party inside with some other women, and Lena goes
with them. The rag-tag bunch of diverse women all have a reason they don’t want
to go back to the world, and Lena discovers that they all have lost the will to
live in one way or another.
The shimmer is a strange place where odd things happen. Ms.
Hen thinks it’s similar to ALICE IN WONDERLAND, and going down the rabbit hole.
The women meet animals that don’t belong there, and flowers look like they’re
growing in the wrong place. Time does not happen in the same way as it happens
outside the shimmer, and the women seem to lose a couple of days after they
first arrive.
There is a lot of discussion between the women of “Going to
the lighthouse,” the place where the shimmer seems to originate, which made Ms.
Hen think of Virginia Woolf’s novel TO THE LIGHTHOUSE. Ms. Hen read this book
twice, and she didn’t like it either time, but it’s well respected in literary
circles. In the novel, the characters talk about going to the lighthouse the
whole book, and at the end, they go to the lighthouse. Ms. Hen didn’t like the
book because she thought it was boring. She liked other books by Woolf,
however. Ms. Hen thinks that the characters in ANNIHILATION talk about this
because it’s their dream, what they hope will be the end of their journey, where
they will find all the answers, similar to the novel. Ms. Hen liked this film
better than that novel.
Many other symbolic things appear in this film. It also has
Bibliical references, and mythological references. This is a beautifully made,
intelligent science fiction film. It didn’t get widespread release because the
movie is strange, but Ms. Hen thinks that the general public doesn’t have
good taste in movies anyway. The ones that make all the money are never the
best films. Ms. Hen is a film snob as well as a book snob, and other types of
snob as well. She can’t really afford to be a snob, but she can’t help it.
Ms. Hen doesn’t write a lot of film reviews because she
mostly writes about books, and she chose to limit what she writes so her
blog doesn’t take over her life. She watches a lot of films, and she loves this
one, and it fits into what she has been reading, the going down the rabbit hole
theme. Ms. Hen recommends this film to people like her who like strange things.
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