<i>Annihilation</i>: A Beautiful Heap of Nonsense
The director Alex Garland’s followup to his debut feature <em>Ex Machina</em> is frequently a pleasure to look at, but lacks structure and coherence.
“I don’t know.”
This statement, or variations on it, is uttered repeatedly throughout the film Annihilation, generally by characters who have returned from “the Shimmer,” a deeply weird sci-fi zone in which the customary laws of physics, biology, time, and memory no longer prevail. It is also a statement that many viewers may be inclined to utter when asked precisely what it was they just watched.
Ambiguity is not necessarily a bad thing in a motion picture. But , the director Alex Garland’s adaptation of the first novel of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, is so resolutely vague, so eager to confound, that its ambiguity becomes itself ambiguous. Does it intend to let viewers balance competing interpretations? Or