Interesting interpretation! I think you make some good points.
[spoiler]I suppose then the reason she couldn’t remember the first few days of the expedition is that she had not yet begun to be “absorbed” or copied or whatever?
What do you mean by saying “she doesn’t claim to be the original Lena”?[/spoiler]
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Originally posted by SlackerInc
[spoiler]I suppose then the reason she couldn’t remember the first few days of the expedition is that she had not yet begun to be “absorbed” or copied or whatever?
What do you mean by saying “she doesn’t claim to be the original Lena”?[/spoiler]
[spoiler]As I recall, at the very end she asks Kane if he’s really Kane, and he says ‘I don’t think so’, and then he asks her if she’s Lena, and she doesn’t respond, and looks uncertain. Then they hug, and we see the shimmer in their eyes. A metaphor for how people change in a relationship, too: they can’t be the same people that they were before her affair.
I think that the copying didn’t happen until they went down the hole in the lighthouse and confronted the alien entity.
The amnesia at the start of the expedition, assuming the narrator is reliable, could be from a couple of things. I like your idea that Lena hadn’t begun to refract yet. In the book, it was because they were hypnotically obligated to forget the passage through the Shimmer, for Reasons - it was psychically traumatic to make the transition. In the movie, it could be an effect of the time refraction, or just General Weirdness to set the mood, and/or an unreliable narrator.[/spoiler]
I took it as shown that…
… the ‘copy’ Lena is what burned. I think the Lena at the end had been refracted so much that even though she in theory has continuity with the Lena from the outside world, she no longer has confidence is who she is in a more figurative sense. I don’t gather that she’s an unreliable narrator in the sense that what we saw in the zone was not a truthful representation of what happened. I take what we saw as what actually happened. Some of this may be colored by what I brought to the film from reading the book, maybe.
I took it as General Weirdness but IDK.
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Like you, I’m happy to accept time travel and transporters in Star Trek. I’m also OK with the talking animals in Charlotte’s Web, a hidden world of magic in Harry Potter, and all the assorted weirdness in Futurama. That’s not the point.
It’s not the deviation from reality that irritated me. It was the lack of internal consistency, logic, and coherence. It was like someone failed Intro to Logic, Screenwriting for Beginners, and Bio 101 and then decided to make a movie. The film can’t make up its mind what story it’s telling, what ideas it wants to explore, or what the rules of its universe are. The end result is an irritating mish-mash of a film that has some visually stunning moments. Those moments don’t make up for its horrible script.
Here are examples of what I’m talking about. Warning: spoilers ahead.
[spoiler]
Having the crew go in feels implausible at best, and all the personal details–like one woman’s cancer, another’s history of self-harm, and the protagonist’s feelings about her husband–are treated as throw-aways. The protagonist’s grief for her dead husband is merely an excuse to get her into the group. There’s no character building or examination of relationships. Why this story was forced into the buddy mold is beyond me, unless the writers wanted to cash in on the all-female ensemble trend.
Furthermore, this mysterious plant that the biologist finds so surprising is clearly something in the bean family and an orchid stuck together. That makes no sense. There’s no way a mutating plant would mysteriously produce flowers from two already extant, unrelated groups of plants. New floral forms wouldn’t be easily identifiable. (I’m not a plant biologist, but I could recognize both flower forms instantly. Any decent organismal biologist would do the same. The conclusion they’d come to is, “Oh, look! Something in the bean family and an orchid stuck together! That’s quite the feat of grafting.”)
The shimmer is caused by an entity that somehow “refracts” everything (whatever that means), including DNA. The consequences of screwing with DNA across an entire geographic area should be lots of adult organisms with cancer and a bunch of dead offspring. Yes, you’d see a few organisms with some odd features, but many of those odd features wouldn’t be obvious. Yet what we see are a few unusual (admittedly, compelling-looking) animals and some very odd lichens. The grasses, sedges, forbs–most of the vegetation we see in the movie–are apparently left completely intact. So is all the Spanish moss. WTF?
In this movie, there are plants that acquire hox genes. Somehow, this makes them become human-shaped topiaries. That makes zero sense, because that’s not even close to what hox genes do.
At one point, there’s a momentous discovery in a military facility that cell signals weren’t being blocked by the shimmer. Instead, they were being scrambled. AFAIK, anyone who works with wireless networks could tell the difference between a blocked signal and a scrambled one pretty quickly. Yet, somehow, it took this elite military group three years to figure it out.
This movie could have been a really good fantasy film, in which a magical entity that’s hungry for a form takes over an area. That could have led to interesting explorations of questions of identity, selfhood, and memory. But what we got was a film that doesn’t have a credible premise or a basic understanding of the science it mentions. It doesn’t seem to understand distinctions between DNA and phenotype or imitation and recombination. We’re left with no clue about what the rules of this universe were, or why anything happened the way it did.[/spoiler]
Exactly right. I don’t insist my movies be either realistic dramas or hard science fiction. I just saw the movie “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”, which has at its center a kind of magic (in a world that otherwise looks like ours and where scientific people don’t believe in magic) that is never explained. Not even in a “this character is actually a demon” or “he found a magic ring”. Just, for some reason, one character has the power to effect a kind of sorcery. That’s totally fine, it works within the parameters of the movie.
But “Annihilation” doesn’t content itself with being about mysterious magic (although I don’t know that it would still be terribly good because it is too unfocused). It jumps up and down and insists to us that it is presenting hard science fiction. And that’s where we get a bunch of pseudoscientific gibberish. The filmmaker thinks he understands science better than he really does, so he takes a bunch of half-understood concepts, has characters labelled as scientists say them in the film, and even shows them using microscopes and other instruments to supposedly demonstrate their cockamamie “science” is true.
So once you’ve insisted on your story being hard science fiction in this way, your story is going to be judged on that basis. And on that basis, it’s a steaming pile of BS.
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And the movie doesn’t even get that part right. When Lena uses a microscope to look at her blood, there’s no light source. Apparently, Lena now has the ability to see in the dark, even at 400x magnification with a limited field of view. And the cells that are supposedly from her blood aren’t red, so there’s no hemoglobin in them. (Nor are they blue, so it’s not like they now use copper to carry O[sub]2[/sub].) She should be dead from lack of oxygen.
Thank you! I’m so glad someone else understands.
Well, I have a biology background too, and I didn’t find the biological business to be a dealbreaker for my enjoyment of the movie.
[spoiler]I strongly disagree that this is supposed to be a hard sci fi movie. A lot of inexplicable stuff happens - temporal, biological, spatial - and some of the characters grope to describe the weirdness they see, with the goal of making clear to the audience that ShitJustGotReal. Showing plants that grow flowers from different plant families, deer with flowered antlers, etc., primes you for changes to start happening with the characters. The description of HOX genes, ‘constant mutation’, etc, to me, just indicate that something is happening, but don’t explain how or why. ‘Refraction’ is as good a word as any to describe an eerie blending process that, yes, should be biologically impossible. I think that the characters know it is impossible, too. Lena says as much. It should also be impossible to catch someone else’s tattoo or speech patterns or have your house show up duplicated in a swamp. They leaned heavy on the biology, cause you get to have some Cronenbergian body horror that way, but there was physics ‘horror’ going on too. I wonder, if the physicist had said that the atomic clocks were running backwards or that the gravity was reflecting too slowly, would it have put you off so much?
I don’t mind that Lena had a magic microscope, like I don’t care that Luke has a magic laser sword. As for the cells dividing before her eyes - it’s to show the viewer that the characters are already affected, even if they look normal. If it was an RBC, nice and red, it shouldn’t divide anyway - no nucleus and terminally differentiated. So maybe it was an immature WBC that squeaked out of her marrow a bit early, or whatever. It also happens way too fast to be real-time. Would the movie have been better if the sequence took half an hour, in a well-lit lab, with power supplies humming away and a full suite of slide preparation equipment and stain baths? An RBC from a drop of her blood shouldn’t be able to spin up into a creepy genetic duplicate, either - no genome, recall.
"We’re left with no clue about what the rules of this universe were, or why anything happened the way it did. " I think that that was kind of the point of the whole movie, actually. They have some sciency-sounding descriptions for the effects they see, but no understanding of the mechanism or purpose, and I think that’s intentional. The book makes clear, and I think that the movie tries to show, that the Southern Reach organization is demoralized and confused by their continual inability to figure out just what the fuck is going on in the Shimmer. It has been three years, and now the only volunteers going in are self-destructive obsessives. The explorers are professionals who try to explain things based on their areas of expertise, like the blind men examining an elephant. Their explanations, by necessity, will be fragmentary and wrong. Their analogies will be forced. The movie wasn’t trying to say ‘Actually, a seven-dimensional intelligence from a parallel universe intersected with Earth as a result of a boom-tube failure, and its attempts to free itself caused local entities’ waveforms to chaotically interfere due to impinging tachyon fields, until the radiative flux from the burning phosphorus provided enough energy at 3230 Angstroms to catalyze the hemitranslation of the orbifold. Thank God we figured it out before the nuclear reactor in the Sun was quenched’. It was trying to say ‘Here’s an unfathomable mystery. What kind of people try to deal with that, and what happens to them?’
Anyway, de gustibus non est disputandum. [/spoiler]
I enjoyed it but am still thinking about it. I think it was more about interesting visuals, feelings and atmosphere than hard science no nitpicking seems to me a waste of time. As for the ending:
While we do clearly see the copy burn I assumed the eyes at the end were meant to convey she was also changed by the experience. If you want to get metaphorical it also could be said that while this new entity is not her husband she made a decision that that doesn’t matter as they are now more alike than different anyway.
It was an enjoyable very creepy night at the movies. I’m not a scientist, in fact science was and is my least fave subject. But it was enjoyable and that’s all I really ask for in a movie.
Quimny, that take on the ending makes sense to me. It was interesting to learn that one of the producers of the movie was desperately campaigning to change the ending after bad results with test audiences, but the other producer stood firm behind the original cut. The movie has now bombed at the box office, justifying his angst; but the failure is being blamed on the film being “too intellectual”, which makes me want to cry—since. I think it is not intellectual enough.
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Ya know, I think your analysis puts the finger on why I didn’t really like the source novel much either. (I read the first two and gave up about halfway through the third because my questions weren’t really being answered.)
I think what it comes down to is a word you often see used around here: “woo”. People love ‘em some woo, and as long as it is kept completely separate from science (like a New Age practitioner who works on your chakras or whatever) I don’t really mind. But so often, pitchers of woo (heh) just can’t resist the temptation to bring their poorly understood notions of science into it, and we get crap like quantum physics being misdescribed as having all kinds of mystical ramifications, and stuff like this movie (and, it sounds like, this book).
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Straight to Netflix with no fanfare here in the UK. I saw it today and as others said, it was a visual treat. First experience with my new 4k tv, so was delighted with its appearance. Didn’t mind the science, or the broadly drawn characters. Liked the female team.
BUT.
It just burned? They hadn’t tried that? Or giving it the common cold? So - get to the lighthouse and set it on fire. Wouldn’t that also kill the copy of her husband?
I really like Tessa Thompson in everything I’ve seen her in but she was kind of wasted in this. IMHO
MiM
Pretty much what I thought—still, I think I liked it overall. I also thought the effects almost reached Lawnmower Man levels at times (particularly at the end), which I just found mystifying in this day and age.
[spoiler]There’s lots of trying to explain the ending, but I really don’t think there’s anything to explain there—that is, there’s no fact of the matter of which of them is real, and which a copy, in the end, they just let their eyes shimmer for some further layer of mystery that doesn’t really have an answer. It felt a bit like the director/writer didn’t really know how to tie it all up, so they didn’t—they had an off-switch type ending for the main threat, the one weak spot you have to hit to blow up the death star/deactivate the droid army/why are all the examples I can think of from Star Wars, and then, just went for the maybe-it-was-a-ghost-after-all finisher.
Sort of disappointing, because overall, I liked the mood, the setting, even the hokey science—it’s meant to not make sense, to be a set of concepts thrown in a blender and arranged in strange ways, because that’s what the shimmer does, and the characters try to come to grips with that (while themselves already having been ‘refracted’, of course, so we shouldn’t take all they say as gospel).
Also, nobody has ever come back out? They didn’t, like, try to walk somebody in an environment suit just a few feet in, on a tether, to pull them back if need be? Just poke a camera on a stick in?[/spoiler]
That last point you made in the spoiler box was a particular sticking point for me. There’s so much handwavium in this movie. “Just go with it”, ad infinitum.
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Saw it.
Good…and…
That 15 minute or so sequence in the Lighthouse was one of the most captivating sequences I’ve seen in a long time. I completely bought in to it. I was transported into it and was so impressed.
Wow.
I think the opening 90 minutes were good, too. But I did not expect to be swept away into the final sequence the way I was.
Impressed.