"Pretty sure he does."
With the planet under a growing threat from a destructive zone named The Shimmer after a meteor strike, Alex Garland's latest film shows all his trademark intelligence, careful construction and visual aplomb. Natalie Portman works well as the seemingly-bereaved biologist who joins a quartet of women set to explore The Shimmer, with a tight focus on their fracturing minds and bodies. The pace is languorous, but the storytelling and dialogue are economic and efficient, and there are some excellent visual ideas (with gorgeous colour-saturated natural sights), and with some appropriate genre nods to Alien, The Thing and 2001. Ultimately, the trip into this other environment is very reminiscent of Apocalypse Now but with scientists, and the intriguing final act proves an interesting challenge. Annihilation is perhaps not the easiest film to market without misrepresenting it to the audience, but its mix of sci-fi, philosophy, body horror and creature-feature maintains interest.
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