In researching Annihilation, Alex Garland’s (yes) masterpiece (and one of my favorite films of all time), I am also taken with how the film could hit different now vs its release, simply because so much has changed in our world, since that “old world” of 2015. We’ve now ended up in a world we don’t understand, locked into our own subjective minds, going insane because we don’t know how we got from where we started, to where we ended up, and whether reality can pull us back and validate that we’re not too far gone, or whether objective reality might ever return for us. So although this is one of those films I watch and watch again, my re-watch will be through the lens of climate change, a pandemic, and our current United States political chaos under Trump.
Seriously… how did we get here? We’ll need quite the perspective for that.
For those who haven’t watched the film, Annihilation the story is hard enough to explain, but many audiences missed the subtext about how humans are constantly self-destructing, and reinventing, such the people we used to think we were are no longer, and we’ve become something else through growth and shared experience. That the people in our lives also change us, because our experiences refract off one another, like what happens in “The Shimmer”. The film also deals with the fragility of the human condition to mental illness, and the complexity of knowing we are constantly never the same due to the complexity of the paths we walk, the people we come across that impact our lives, and the accountability of our choices. It easily bests Taxi Driver in that regard, even sprinkling the claustrophobic isolationism in, perhaps not as well. I still think Taxi Driver addresses mental illness as directly as any film has expertly done, but the nuance and story in Annihilation are on a different level, narratively and visually.
SO….. Alex Garland on Annihilation’s story, and how it’s eerily similar to how we all feel, today. ***Listen to only the one minute to 4m40s approx, unless you’re curious for more***. I quoted what he said, precisely, in case you don’t want to clicky:
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The journey of the film as we used to describe it between ourselves was a journey from suburbia to psychedelia. We begin very much in the world we know and we end in a world we don’t know, and when we get there like a frog sitting in increasingly boiling water, you know, and that is a description of a journey from an objective state to a subjective state… & what happens, in a way, to the people in this place is that they go mad, and that is in some sense falling deeper and deeper into your own subjective state and having it not corrected by the external, objective world.
Here’s the clip, however the entire behind the scenes are this philosophical. Some of the sausage making is amazing. =)