Thread by @ebertvoices

Live Tweet of Annihilation starting now.

The story begins in the middle, like a medical oddity, Lena is the patient.

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.

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.

Looking at a cell taken from a tumor in a woman’s cervix — significant to ideas of fertility, motherhood/childishness, birth and death.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*scene

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.

“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...

“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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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....

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.

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).

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).

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 -- ...

..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.

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...

...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).

The monster that is "born" in this scene appears normal but on closer inspection is confirmed to be a mutation, abnormal, a monster. But rather than a Dr. Frankeinstein character playing God, it's "God", i.e. nature, the cosmos, or some "natural" force we haven't seen before.

"We can't crossbreed between different species." "The mutations were subtle at first, They grew more extreme as we got closer to the lighthouse. Corruptions of form. Duplicates of form....Echoes." But are these really "unnatural"? Or just new?

It depends on where you stand, how you're feeling, what your purpose or agenda is. What prism you're looking through.

I love Cass asking Lena if the locket around her neck is "a husband or a child," a subtle affirmation that no catastrophic loss is greater or lesser than another, but that whatever the nature of the loss, she is empathetic enough to sense it.

"I also lost someone. Not a husband, though, a daughter, Leukemia....In a way it's two bereavements. My beautiful girl, and the person I once was." This line hit me particularly hard, having suffered 3 catastrophic losses in three years back in the aughts.

Making the Kane connection official, this scene in the abandoned warehouse is the most overtly Alien-like scene in the movie so far, introducing an aspect of body horror that's been subtext (expressed mainly via dialogue) until now. Though Kane's spitting blood foreshadows it.

Few actors are better at making exposition fascinating than Jennifer Jason Leigh. Though certainly Jeff Goldblum is right up there with her.

"For those that follow. I believe that means...us." JJL bringing it vocally here. Scary without trying to be. "For Those That Follow" could be an alternate title for Annihilation, or just a subtitle appearing on the other side of a colon.

Cronenberg-level disturbance here as the belly is cut open, revealing a writhing snake/worm that apparently is living symbiotically/parasitically within a human host, but is it like a tumor/cancer or a baby? How much difference is there in this creation/destruction-driven film?

The way the disgustingness is photographed reminds me of The X-Files (illumination of the unspeakable by a single flashlight) and the glimpses of hell/the other dimension in Event Horizon, a film that this one also sometimes evokes (truly a haunted house film in space).

Now comes another flashback to the domestic life Lena and Kane had before his departure/disappearance/one year absence. It's a psychological haunting, constantly plaguing Lena. I love how the final shot before she wakes up shows Kane leaving her alone in the frame. Separation.

The cottony clouds in the moonlit sky as Lena goes to check on Ventress look like something out of a children's storybook, though in this case we're being prepped for something in the spirit of a Grimm fairy tale, not the reassuring books kids read now. A monster in the woods.

"As a psychologist I would say you're confusing suicide with self destruction..Almost none of us commit suicide..Almost all of us self-destruct, at some point in our lives.,,,these aren't decisions, they're impulses..."

I love that Ventress suggests Lena is "better equipped" to explain this than she is, and Lena reacts with a hint of offense (maybe she thinks she's being judged for "throwing away" her marriage via that secret affair) but Vetnress is referring to her being a biologist.

The first violent death occurs almost exactly at the halfway mark in this movie. You could perhaps say that this is the point where Annihilation "divides" and becomes a bit more horror than science-fiction, though the duality is always present.

The lighthouse, of course, will illuminate the situation, or at least that's what some of the team are hoping for. Light and dark in opposition.

I am only now realizing that the story of Annihilation unfolds over seven days, which is of course how long it took for God to create the world in the Old Testament.

Of course the exact timeframe here is open to debate, given how filmmaker Alex Garland deliberately blurs things to leave us in doubt about our perceptions. A lot of this movie seems to be unfolding in "dream time." Elastic and malleable.

The white deer with flower antlers is accompanied by Lena's theme -- and more so than any image so far in the film, it encompasses the idea of creation and destruction being flip sides of the same existence. It's a beautiful mutation, inevitable and serene.

The daylight vision follows directly from a scene of a dark, toothy bear killing a woman at night in the very same fairy tale forest. Yin/yang.

The humans made entirely of flowers suggest both a higher evolutionary form and also the result of a curse (the pillars of salt after the story of Sodom's destruction) or a man-made act of mass destruction (Hiroshima) or a natural disaster (Vesuvius).

The plants have human body plan arms and legs attached to hips..."the shimmer is a prism but it refracts everything, ... animal DNA plant DNA all DNA." "Our DNA." Everything collapsing into one. A primordial pool of matter.

The first time the team entered this house, for a moment I thought they were back in Lena's house. The recurrence of Lena's theme on the soundtrack and the framing of certain rooms makes me think this is intentional. (It's not the same house, the kitchen furniture is different).

The match cut from Kane sitting at their kitchen table to Lena shuddering at her table leads directly to the image of Lena having sex with Daniel, the married lover who reads her pretty well. "It's not me you hate, it's yourself." "No, Dan, its you, too."

This image of betrayal is followed instantly by Lena being woken up violently with the words "You lying bitch," which sets up the interrogation scene -- she kept the truth from them -- now come the repercussions, the lack of forgiveness. This all feels like a nightmare of guilt.

And of course we're about to see the most intense violent scene in the entire movie. "Husband....Why didn't you tell us?" The violence of Anya (whose name means mother, interestingly) presages the return of the bear, an id creature reminiscent of the one from Forbidden Planet.

"Did you kill Cass? Did you lose your shit? Or did you think I lost my shit and now were gonna fuck each other up? That's theory two." :When I look at my hands, at my fingerprints, I can see them moving." She's afraid her insides "are gonna move like my fingerprints."

On the edge of madness, she's becoming a force of pure destruction/violence. The cries of "Help me, help me" (Cass absorbed by the bear creature) express the terror of the women in this "hostage situation," A woman's rage and paranoid are being projected onto other women, and...

..the bear, in addition to being, well, a monster, is also her monster, her rage and fear made manifest.

This is one of the scariest monsters in the entire history of movies, y'all. An unspeakable vision of unnatural/natural violence/terror/vengeance/fear. All the dark emotions combined. Faces, skull, eye, bone, fangs. And it is completely destroyed after destroying.

Oscars don't really validate anything, but this movie deserved one for special effects and sound design, just for the scene with the bear, which is right up there with the best of the Alien series.

The death of Josie Radek is the only one in the film that doesn't feel sad or obscene. She finds a third way, simply giving in to whatever it is that's happening. She merges with the infinite, to quote a Coen brothers film that has nothing in common with this one.

"One by one, all gone, except you," the interrogator asks her in the present. A question anyone faces if they live long enough.

Crosby Stills & Nash's "Helplessly Hoping" comes back on again, a sad song that sounds happy, a love song about loss, perfect for this story -- and echoing the Lena theme.

The shot of a woman walking alone on a beach, the camera moving to reveal crystal trees In the background, is an image worthy of a great SF cover from the middle part of the last century.

And now we come to the end of our story. The confrontation/acceptance. Dave Bowman flying into the monolith. Ellen Ripley confronting the beast in the shuttle at the end of Alien. Roy and Jillian looking down at the landing pad in CE3K.

Lena watching Kane destroy/replace himself, destruction/creation, mitosis climaxing with the death of the original cell. "I thought I was a man. I had a life. People call me Kane. And now I'm not so sure. If I wasn't Kane, what was I? Was I you? Were you me?"

"My flesh moves like liquid. My mind is cut loose. I can't bear it." This is a deathbed scene, traditional and even classical despite its presence in an SF film where a man is destroying himself with a phosphorus grenade. He could be Tolstoy's Ivan Illyich.

Images of small, dark holes -- like dead eyes, birth canals, rectums -- drains, toilets, sinks -- where dead matter goes, or where toxic matter is expelled. This is the unnerving flip side of all the birth/natural splendor imagery we've seen elsewhere.

The ashy figures on the floor echo the flower people. More yin/yang imagery connecting creation/destruction, natural/unnatural, reproduction/cancer, mitosis/metastasis.

"I needed to know what was inside the lighthouse, but that moment's passed. It's inside me now." Ventress, alive after all, but not alive. "It's unlike us. I don't know what it wants. But it wants. And it will grow until it encompasses everything." Cancer consuming the planet.

Ventress spitting psychedelic ectoplasm up over her head, seized by the power of the force within her, is a great horror film image but also a great SF image, and the shimmering (!!) strings on the soundtrack leaven the feeling of ominousness.

That deep bass synth noise is right up there with John Williams five-note CE3K theme as an instantly iconic musical motif signaling that you're watching one of the all time great SF films. And when that rumble comes up and we go into biological/cosmic Tree of Life/2001 images.

I saw this movie multiple times in a theater and each time this final sequence arrived, I realized that it was really this that I came back for. Its right up there with the Stargate sequence in 2001 and the last 40 minutes of CE3K. The double dancing with her.

Great CE3K connection with the double trying to speak to Lena in that burbling synth "voice" that's like Peter Frampton's "Do You Feel Like I Do" talking guitar, except coming from the other side of a dimensional portal or whatnot.

Staging this final scene as a combination fight/sexual assault/mirroring/mothering/othering is a stroke of genius. So many SF movies that go for a 2001 finale try to go big, and the brilliance of this is that its small. A two-character play, one actress vs. herself.

As other have noted, there's also a strain of Mama/Babadook grief-horror in this "dance number," with grief/trauma externalized as a bogeyman figure chasing the heroine, who resists/fights and then gives in, and only then is able to guide/direct/control it.

Lena regarding this slender foil THING that she knows is her (on some level) is maybe the deepest visual connection between this film and 2001, which ends with the sole survivor of a doomed space mission in a small room, regarding different versions of himself, and dying.

One of the many (appealingly simple and direct) readings of this ending is the way grief changes you into something that is not you anymore, yet at the same time also you, and I really like that take on it, a lot.

Ten wordless minutes of splendid imagery, music and sound effects here, my friends. This is pure cinema. The best work Alex Garland has ever done. The pinnacle of his career as a writer-director to date. Hats off. Major, major work. Kubrick-worthy.

The shot of Lena regarding the burning lighthouse in the background is perhaps the most Tarkovsky-like image in a movie that obviously owes a huge amount to Tarkovsky, even though it has no exactly equivalent in the master's filmography.

The crystal trees burning and collapsing into magma, a fireworks display on the ground, no sound, only music. Magnificent. This entire climax is an intellectual and philosophical fireworks display, an arena-rock spectacle of thought.

"It mirrored me. I attacked it. I'm not even sure it knew I was there." Lena deflecting the interrogator's attempts to superimpose simplistic, binary, definable interpretations on what we've just seen is the most overt metafictional/autocritical touch in the film.

This is a classic SF/horror film from @jeffvandermeer and Alex Garland and a superlative cast and crew. In another era it might've been properly promoted and allowed to build. Sad to realize that fifty years ago, the #1 film in North America was 2001, another philosophical work.

And now we end on a note that's maybe more horror than SF. "You aren't Kane, are you?" "I don't think so.""Are you Lena?" I laughed out loud at this the first time I saw the film -- another instance of the movie telling you how to watch it. He's probably not Kane, but he is....

She's Lena, but she's not, because of the pain and grief she's suffered, which transforms a person.

This concludes my life-Tweet of ANNIHILATION. If you enjoyed this, let us know in the credits, and subscribe!