Southern Reach

Even before I read Jeff VanderMeer's novel, I was excited about the upcoming movie: Annihilation (2018). After I read it, I was even more excited. I was puzzled when I saw it though, until I saw a quote from the Alex Garland, who wrote and directed: He called it a "dream of the book". He read the book, then adapted it without re-reading (or looking at the second and third books of the "Southern Reach" trilogy). So, although it doesn't share many events with the book, it captures the feeling very well.

It starts with Natalie Portman in quarantine, being debriefed by by Benedict Wong. She doesn't seem to have much to say. They talk about her husband and - flashback. Her husband, Oscar Isaac, is a soldier. He went on a mission and didn't come back for a year. Portman, a cancer biologist, has just given up on ever seeing him again, when he appears in the house. He can't say where he's been or how he's gotten back - he doesn't seem to know. Then he gets very sick, the government comes and sticks him in a secret facility.

A psychologist, Jennifer Jason Leigh, gives her a few clues - there's an area of the United States, Area X, behind a force field of some sort, called the Shimmer. No one and nothing that goes into the area comes back. Except Isaac. Now, Leigh is going in, and Portman volunteers to join.

The team includes Tessa Thompson, a black physics genius, Tuva Novotny, another scientist, and Gina Rodriguez, a medic (I really thought it was Michelle Rodriguez - similar look and badass personality, but no relation, I guess). They hike into the Shimmer, and wake up in tents, with evidence that they had been there for days. They start to hike toward the shore, to find the Lighthouse.

They travel through tropical jungle, running into horrible creatures, beautiful flowers, and rampant moss and mold. Worse, they find humans transformed into these new lifeforms. And they also start gong mad, and start dying. Tessa has the best death - she knows she will live on in some way and doesn't want to end up eternally screaming in fear. So she lets the Shimmer transform her into a human shaped flowering bush.

When they get to the Lighthouse, they find a sphincter-like hole in the base and a tunnel beneath. In the book, it was a little different. They found a hole near their base camp, that the biologist thought of as a tower - one that went down instead of up. Also, there was a fire-and-brimstone sermon written in moss that went on and on, the deeper you went. I was sorry they left that out.

Some other differences: In the book, no one had names, just roles: The biologist, the psychologist, etc. The psychologist had loaded them up with post-hypnotic suggestions, so the disorientation wasn't entirely due to the Shimmer (which wasn't called that in the book - it was just Area X or the Southern Reach). Also, in the movie, Tessa Thompson has some bafflegab explanation for the phenomenon, but the book left it as just a mystery.

Also, in the book, the biologist is a bit autistic, even before she enters Area X. She didn't much care for people, felt distant even from her husband, but could get lost for hours just watching a tidal pool, a tadpole pond, or the puddle in a drained swimming pool. Portman's character is much more of a normal, engaged, social person.

But the movie did manage to get some of the blankness, the anomie, the void at the heart of life inside and outside the Shimmer. Garland does a little more explaining (hint: it's about identity) but still lets some of the mystery stand.

It seems that the studio thought he left entirely too much mystery in, that the movie was too intellectual and nobody would understand it. As a result, it was barely released, and Netflix paid to stream it. Kind of a shame, but at least we got to see it.

Another difference from the book - the book was very clearly set on the coast of the Florida panhandle. It is never mentioned, but I could tell VanderMeer was describing the area around St. Marks. I had visited the lighthouse there when I lived in Tallahassee. It seems they tried to film there, but the vegetation was so thick, the camera couldn't really register anything. So the final look isn't quite Gulf Coast.