Whoa. We've got a real big one here. I mean, wow. This is only my second go-round at this movie, since I watched it about... ten months ago, I want to say? Which makes this weird strange sometimes visceral thing associated with the holiday season for me. Make no mistake, the grim and gruesome shit that occasionally pops up, along with some of the existential horrors present, make it a perfect fit for this season... but it's far more than just a spooky mood piece with some gory bits. This movie's practically drowning in symbolism and metaphor, and you could deep dive through it for thousands of words. I'm not qualified to do that, and these are only quickies, but I did a little digging online myself to find some stuff worth talking about. As long as I get a post's worth out of it and don't massively misread the movie, I'm fine. My sources are resonant enough that I shouldn't do the latter, and as for the former... have you been here before? I'm the goddamned champion of dragging a point out with needless bullshit in order to hit a reasonable quota. For god's sakes, I'm doing it right now with these run ons that delay us out to make a decent-sized opening paragraph. It's a wonder I'm allowed to do this. Well then. Annihilation. What do we make of that?I'm not being coy, I'm literally analyzing the title again and making a big deal out of it. Annihilation is the key word of the whole movie, and most of the big crunchy themes in the film are metaphors for it. The relationship between our protagonist Lena and her husband Kane, "annihilated" by both his disapperance and her infidelity, for instance. Totally something you can read into, but there are far bigger metaphors. Ones that work on multiple levels with multiple pieces of the film. Cancer, for instance. An annihilation of healthy cells. We open the movie with Lena teaching a class about cancer cells. Dr. Ventress, leader of the expedition, has a terminal cancer. Sheppard's daughter died of leukimia. Then there's the Shimmer itself, a strange and weird expanding thing that keeps growing, taking over the life within it and changing it. A tumor on the world itself. Change is another powerful metaphor within the film, and you can see how all of these things are intertwined with each other. In a dark sardonic way, what is change but the annihilation of who you used to be? The Shimmer is literally changing the DNA structure of things inside it, refracting them into all sorts of strange forms. what remains is different from what came before, and what came before is... you guessed it, annihilated in one sense of the word. The movie is asking questions of our capacity to change, as well as our own capacity for self-destruction. Every member of the expedition suffers their own form of self-destruction, and it all hinges on another theme; trauma.
As much as we as people change, trauma is a thing that sticks with us. This is something explored within the film, in its own way, as the different traumas of the characters are what ends up being their... annihilation. They change, yes, but the trauma remains and it is what undoes them. Sheppard, whose child died from random factors she couldn't control, is killed by a random bear attack she didn't see coming. Anya, hotheaded under pressure, loses her cool and is also killed. Josie, holding on to life, becomes part of the Shimmer. Dr. Ventress's own body betrays her, her cells destroying themselves. It's only Lena who manages to survive her own trauma, her own annihilation, by accepting that part of herself. Only then can she escape the rainbow alien mirroring her (Okay, I had to mark out for some mirror stuff). The final shot shows us Kane and Lena, irrevocably changed by what they experienced in the Shimmer. Whoever they were before going in, they've been annihilated... and yet, something of them remains. Enough of them remains to embrace, ready to live on, to move on. To change even further. So yeah, this was a pretty basic analysis and you have my apologies if I glossed over something, but wow. This movie is a hell of a movie. Check it out, make your own reading, your own deep dives, and like... enjoy and stuff. God we really only have three of these left, huh?
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