The story begins in the middle, like a medical oddity, Lena is the patient.
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How wonderfully counterintuitive to have the first major musical Q and the plot be driven by solo guitar, a folk instrument, redolent of the 1960s, the era when intellectual, cosmic science-fiction Broke through the mainstream cinema.
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Biological imagery establishes the idea of mitosis which will be increasingly important as the phone goes on. So having them put Lena is both a cellular biologist and ex-Military, interested in both creation and destruction.
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Looking at a cell taken from a tumor in a woman’s cervix — significant to ideas of fertility, motherhood/childishness, birth and death.
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Now establishing Daniel, Lena’s lover, the locus of much of her guilt — a married man. It’s been one year since the death of Lena’s husband. I love how she stumbles over the word “our” when mentioning that she’s going to paint the bedroom. A divided pair.
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Another connection to 1960s popular culture in this word list montage of grief at remembrance — “wordlessly watching, he waits by the window, and wonders at the empty place inside.“ presaging the return of Kane.
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Possibly notable: the name of her husband (Kane) is a double reference, to the Bible character who slays his brother (another divided pair) (foreshadowing of what is going to come at the end) and a reference to the character an alien who is a womb for the title creature.
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A third reference of course is to Citizen Kane, a nonlinear account of a man’s life, ending with a mystery that appears to solve itself but is actually open ended, much like this film.
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Expository seen in the kitchen is made more eerie by this Taxi Driver style cutaway to the drinking glass. Notice the clasped hands (a divided pair Reunited) seeming to merge in the distorted water.
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No sooner is her husband reborn that he dies instantly. And now we get a touch of the paranoid thriller with the heroine screaming “let him go“ and attempting to intervene only to be whisked away. There’s a strong flavor of military thriller to this science fiction/horror movie.
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“You must be feeling dreadful” is the first line of dialogue by Dr. Ventress, the Jennifer Jason Leigh character. It describes the heroine’s entire existence at this point in time. “ why am I talking to a psychologist?“ She asks. Well...
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“The genetically planned lifecycle of a cell” was the title of Lena’s paper, I touched it perfectly encapsulates this particular story and all of the metaphors and symbols contained in it. Birth, death, decay, rebirth, cancer, meta-stasis, mitosis.
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Beautiful prowling shot through a part of the base exposed to sunlight — and now we are on the edge of a fairytale land, Area X, as imaginatively potent as Oz or LV 426 or Devil’s Tower in CE3K or The Zone in Stalker or the title planet in Solaris. All sources for Annihilation.
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Scenario Ventress describes to our heroine is essentially cancer spreading throughout the world and eventually devouring everything. But you could also see it as an infestation of lichens or algae, the earth reclaiming itself.
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“God doesn’t make mistakes, it’s kind of the key to the whole being a God thing,“ her husband says, and one of the rare moments when the movie directly addresses the idea of a superior being running things.
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I don’t get the impression that the movie really believes in that stuff except as a minor metaphorical tool. Call way of framing the indifference of science/nature/the cosmos to what individual human beings might want.
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I love the little scene with Lena and Kane (old Kane? Not the double) in bed. His southern accent is stronger, I think, than the returned Kane's. The acting between Isaac and Portman is loose, with an almost improvised feeling, and her throaty laugh is genuine. He's funny.
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Introducing all the other women who will join Lena -- one of the only scenes in this movie that I find rather awkward and forced, everyone basically reciting their resume and hitting life milestones, though a lot of great SF films (including 2001) have scenes like this.
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The calm before the storm (going into the Shimmer) also establishes the sense of dread. No one else came back from previous expeditions. They were all male and all military, no scientists. That this is a mixed (most intellectual) group of women suggests a shift in tactics.
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Jennifer Jason Leigh is such a marvelous actress that she can imbue straightforward expository lines like "I choose the volunteers, I pick the teams" with an undertone of sadness and menace, like she's describing something that she saw in a nightmare a long time ago.
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"You can learn. You can save him," Ventress says of Kane, to Lena. "I'm only trying to understand what drove you," Lomax says to her in the flash forward. "I owed him, so I went in," she says. Obligation of one half of a pair to another. Seeking to rejoin.
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I love the smeary rainbow lines separating The Shimmer from the rest of the world -- like somebody spilled all sorts of different colors of paint in an arts project gone horribly wrong. Another allusion to creation and destruction -- everting mixed together....
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First confirmation of Lena's affair is a wordless flashback with very few shots, leading back to the present, Lena in a tent, the time rupture signaled by an oddly framed closeup of the sun shining through a gap in the zipper of her tent in the forest.
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Lots of intriguingly composed inserts like that in
@AnnihilationMov, where you're looking at a particular thing but it also seems to suggest other things, often physical/medical in nature (an eye, an orifice) or mythological (eye of God, a portal into another world).Show this thread -
Tessa Thompson does a lot with the relaxed, internalized world-weariness and sensitivity of Josie Radek, maybe my second favorite character in the film, and a marvelous counterpart to Lena (truly a woman of science).
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That solo guitar theme with an underlay of synthesized menace comes in again as the women travel deeper into the forest -- reminding us of that opening where we saw the meteor striking the lighthouse to create Area X/The Shimmer -- ...
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..the shots of all those women accompanied by what is essentially Lena's Theme suggests that everyone else in the unit expresses aspects of Lena. But the reverse is also true -- this is a prismatic film, and everyone in it expresses aspects of everyone else.
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And now we come to the alligator scene, the first outright confirmation that Annihilation is as much a horror film as SF (though the line between the two is often porous, as movie history has repeatedly confirmed). It's a monster movie now, a stalking film. However...
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...the movie keeps tabs on the ideas of birth/death/connection/separation/pairs/singularities with throwaway lines of dialogue (the shack looks like where someone would have a wedding) and the way the alligator attacks (rising up from an indoor "lagoon" as if being born).
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