Movie Monsters

It’s time to look at another movie monster today, but this one is a little more abstract than the unsettling Norse demigod we looked at in the last article. Annihilation, directed by Alex Garland and based on the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, is one of my favourite modern sci-fi films. Our main protagonist is biologist Lena, who is shocked when her missing soldier husband, Kane, reappears without warning after a year-long absence on a covert government mission. However, he returns as a changed, hollow version of himself, and he soon collapses with organ failure. Authorities swoop in, and Lena is brought before psychologist Dr Ventress at a secret federal research facility called the Southern Reach. Ventress explains that Kane had been part of a team that had entered the mysterious Area X – a subtropical wilderness where an alien infestation is slowly encroaching behind an amorphous, iridescent, reality-shifting barrier known as the Shimmer.

Hoping to understand what is happening to her husband, Lena joins Ventress’ all-woman science team – each with their own motivations and traumas – as they enter Area X to try and find out what, exactly, it is. Once inside, the expedition discovers a dream-like wilderness of mutated landscapes and creatures that are both beautiful and terrifying. As the group travels deeper, heading towards the centre of the phenomenon, they begin to slowly unravel, psychologically and physically. As director Alex Garland describes it, the movie is ‘a journey from suburbia to psychodelia’.

From the outside, as seen from the Southern Reach, the Shimmer appears as a diaphanous membrane enveloping the forest. Inside Area X, the Shimmer has an omnipresent iridescence, producing a wealth of strange, beautiful prismatic light effects. It was inspired by the northern lights – the way light refracts and dances through the atmosphere in different and intriguing ways. To explore what this might look like in a realistic way, the production team brought optically interesting objects to a camera test day. ‘I had a crystal ball at home that I brought in,’ says visual effects artist Tom Rolfe. ‘Our gaffer, Andy Lowe, had some theatrical lanterns, and we got hold of some old lenses and shone lights through those to create flares. We filmed hours of footage, picked the best bits and scanned those. We added rainbow patterns to specular reflections on water, similar to when jet contrails are backlit and refract with rainbow qualities. As the characters go deeper into the Shimmer, we ramped up those effects. We didn’t want to detract from the performances, so it had to be a subliminal effect; and then, for certain key moments, we’d bring it front and centre.’

Much of Annihilation was filmed in Windsor Great Park in Oxfordshire, England, so set dressing had to be added to the natural vegetation to create the strange, exotic flora of Area X. The animation team added forest canopies, extra lichens, and other growths and outcroppings to complement set dressings. Tree lines, meanwhile, were extended with Floridian trees and moss. A mixture of matte paintings and computer graphics was used to bring tumorous fungal growths to life. Alex Garland wanted them to feel like they were breathing, and the final result is a simple, almost imperceptible effect so that viewers would register a bit of weirdness but not necessarily understand why.

So, what is the Shimmer? At its simplest, it is a mysterious, ever-expanding, ever-shifting zone caused by what appears to be an extraterrestrial impact. Within the Shimmer, the laws of nature behave unpredictably. This unknowable alien presence can scramble and combine the DNA of everything it touches via refraction – the redirection of a wave as it passes from one medium to another. In the real world, refraction mainly applies to light and sound, not to cells. But this alien entity can somehow cause organic matter around it to refract, even at the DNA level, causing plants and animals (yes, including humans) to mutate again and again in surreal, often disturbing ways. Confused? Well, just imagine one of these alien cells residing on a normal plant. The plant DNA will be refracted to take on the DNA of the alien cell. The plant will then take on the DNA of other living things around it. This process can cause multiple plant species to grow from a single stem.

Basically, anything and everything organic within the Shimmer’s expanding field is mutated on a genetic level, resulting in creatures that display the characteristics, behaviours, and appearance of others. As Lena and the team move through Area X, they encounter a massive albino alligator that has the teeth of a shark; a pair of albino deer with extremely long necks, crested with floral growths on their antlers; and, most notably, a horrific mutant bear with a mangy pelt, denuded skull, empty pits for eyes, and the ability to mimic human voices.

This bear was once an ordinary animal, but, like everything else within the Shimmer, it has become genetically interlaced with other organisms. When it kills one of the science team, Cass, and rips away her throat, her human vocal cords – and possibly part of her dying mind – are spliced with the bear, giving the animal the highly unsettling ability to scream out in her voice. According to Alex Garland, the bear doesn’t understand what it’s doing. ‘It doesn’t have Cass’s intelligence or anything; it’s an animal that doesn’t know what it’s become and is clearly suffering,’ he explains. ‘Cass is dead. Only her last emotion – fear – was transferred to the bear.’ So, when the bear roars, all it can produce are her last words – ‘Help me!’ – which are simply echoed noises now embedded into its throat. The beast is in a state of despair and pain rather than anger.

Annihilation’s visual effects supervisor, Andrew Whitehurst, said the creature was concocted in Alex Garland’s screenplay as a physical manifestation of distorted genetics that cause sickness and strange shapes within the Shimmer. To create the bear, they looked at diseased animals, particularly the way that the skin can be malnourished and blistered. Then, the visual effects artists used 3D software to mash human and bear skull and facial features together. ‘We looked at that and said, ‘That’s horrible, that’s really very visually striking and interesting, what can we do with that?’ Whitehurst says. ‘The rest of the creature, in terms of its physiognomy, is very bear-like, but in order to get the idea of the sickness, we had parts – particularly around the face, the skull, and flesh – atrophied in a way.’

Annihilation constantly shows us mutations within The Shimmer, but Garland wisely abstains from presenting everything as simply gross or beautiful. There’s a calculated indifference to the mutations. Sometimes you might see something pretty and magical, like the white, delicate deer with branches for antlers – and sometimes you get ScreamBear. ‘The creatures that Lena and the team encounter all represent different things,’ says Garland. ‘Everything is cross-related, and everything had to work according to our thematic story logic. The idea is that everything in Area X is colliding – there are collisions of different species, but also collisions of psychology and species, emotions and species, minerals and trees – everything is formed from some sort of collision, or multiple collisions.’

Garland starts all of his films with a central idea. For Annihilation, it was self-destruction, and in particular, the human impulse to destroy ourselves. It’s no wonder that Lena has the profession she does and works with cancer cells. In fact, the film makes it clear that Lena is highly self-destructive. Although it initially seems like she and Kane are in a deeply romantic relationship, her self-destructive tendencies cause her to cheat on him whenever he leaves on a mission – something Kane eventually discovers, leading him to take on more and more dangerous missions, finally culminating in the expedition into Area X.

Self-destruction may include psychological self-destruction, caused by human behaviour, but it can also include cancer, because cancer is, effectively, one’s own body attacking itself. The Shimmer makes a good stand-in for how cancer strikes. In fact, one of the basic premises of Annihilation is, ‘What if the Earth – that is, the planet itself – got cancer?’ ‘Everything is normal, and then it’s not,’ Garland says on the subject of cancer. ‘And in its place is something that’s mutating and, like The Shimmer, expanding. Yes, we can talk about risk factors, but there are perfectly healthy people who still get cancer.’

One by one, the members of Lena’s team succumb to the Shimmer’s distortions. Lena herself eventually reaches the centre of the phenomenon – a lighthouse, which is where the meteorite containing the alien cells crashed into Earth. This is where the Shimmer is radiating from. Here, she discovers a recording of Kane’s final moments, revealing that the man who returned home was not the original Kane but an uncanny duplicate. You see, in addition to being able to mix DNA and mutate things, the Shimmer can also create near-perfect clones of sapient beings that inherit all of the original’s DNA and, seemingly, their memories. The Shimmer used Kane’s blood to create a humanoid replica that, over time, came to echo Kane’s personality. It even began to copy his voice, albeit with a different accent. We don’t know how long Kane spent with the alien replica, but about a year passed in the world outside the Shimmer. Eventually, the refraction of Kane’s DNA caused the real Kane’s flesh to move like liquid, and he began to lose his mind. He decided to kill himself and asked his alien doppelgänger to find Lena on the outside.

These alien copies seem to genuinely believe they are who they are imitating, yet at the same time appear to be vaguely aware of their true origin. When Lena asks Alien-Kane if he really is her husband after learning what he is, he replies, ‘I don’t think so.’ And the reason why Alien-Kane began coughing blood and suffering organ failure when he showed up at Lena’s house towards the start of the movie? It may be because the alien cells need to be inside the Shimmer to survive. Once on the outside, their cells become self-destructive.

Beneath the lighthouse, in a cavern made by the meteorite when it hit Earth, in the place first inhabited by the alien cells, Lena sees Ventress. Or at least a highly altered Ventress, whose face is now liquid. Most of her DNA has now been spliced with the alien cells. ‘I needed to now what was inside the lighthouse,’ Ventress says when Lena confronts her. ‘That moment’s passed. It’s inside me now. It’s not like us. It’s unlike us. I don’t know what it wants. Or if it wants. But it will grow until it encompasses everything. Our bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts until not one part remains. Annihilation.’

The closer characters get to the lighthouse, and by extension the cavern beneath it, the more they comment on feeling as though they are physically falling apart. And they’re correct. Within the cavern, the Shimmer dissolves beings and creates new refractions of whatever DNA is in the space, including humans. Dr Ventress disintegrates into a shimmering cloud of matter and swirling colour from which ethereal light glows. This seems to be the alien being in its truest conceivable form – or at least the closest to its true form that can be comprehended by humans. It is based on a Mandelbulb, a type of 3D fractal – an extremely complex, infinitely detailed mathematical object whose structure repeats at every scale. It is likely that Garland and the visual effects team referenced the Mandelbulb when designing the alien entity because the fractal’s branching, self-similar structure echoes the film’s themes of mutation, refraction, and self-replication.

From this sequence alone, it is clear that the Shimmer is the epitome of a truly alien being, unlike us in every way. It can sublimate human concepts of reality and the laws of nature. It has no real sentient qualities. It is not motivated by any of the things that motivate us. In fact, it’s not motivated by anything at all. It’s more like a spore – or a cancer. Cancer cells don’t want anything, malicious or benevolent. But they grow until they encompass everything and annihilate the body. The alien cells work exactly like that, mindlessly changing and destroying with no real intent or plan. The only difference is that they affect all living species. The Shimmer’s only ‘goal’ is to propagate itself across the universe and assimilate everything into it. If the Shimmer continued expanding, it could cause all life on our planet to mutate into a chaotic bramble beyond human comprehension.

Using the atoms of Ventress’ broken-down body and a drop of Lena’s blood, the entity changes into a faceless, shimmering humanoid. This figure absorbs Lena’s machine gun fire and pursues her from the cavern back up into the lighthouse, where it matches Lena’s motions, mimicking her, beseeching her, preventing her from fleeing in a strange mirror dance. Unable to escape the creature, Lena tricks it into igniting one of Kane’s leftover phosphorous grenades as it transforms into her doppelgänger.

Lena flees the burning lighthouse, and the Shimmer collapses and dissipates, destroying itself as it mindlessly mimics the explosion. It did not seek its own annihilation – but it began reflecting Lena’s self-destructive nature. It could even be argued that self-destruction is a human-wide phenomenon, possibly ingrained within us at a biological level.

However, although much of the Shimmer was certainly destroyed after it assimilated self-destructiveness into its genetic makeup, it has not completely vanished by the end of the movie. It has simply reached a new stage of evolution – changing into the form of Kane and, quite probably, Lena.

Was that truly Lena at the end of the film? Was it Alien-Lena? Or had she perhaps become an amalgamation of her entire squad? To Garland, it doesn’t really matter. ‘‘It’s like the moment in the beginning of the film when Lena decides to paint the bedroom,’ he says. ‘Is it the same room, if it has a different coat of paint? It’s in the same physical space, but it could become something new.’ In a similar vein, there is a simple philosophical paradox called the Ship of Theseus, which concerns whether a ship that has had all of its parts replaced is still the same ship. Garland continues, ‘You take all the wooden planks out, you put them in another ship, you build another ship, and by the end of it, you’ve got a perfect facsimile, and then everyone wonders – which is the Ship of Theseus, and which is the copy? But I quite like the version where it’s both.’