The Story of Annihilation Movie

Annihilation is a new sci-fi movie based on a book by Jeff VanderMeer. It’s about an alien place that grows and mutates and about the people who it changes. It explores themes of life and death, raises some cool mysteries, and builds on the ideas of the book. The story follows an expedition into the mysterious Area X – a wilderness surrounded by a strange “border” called the Shimmer. Anyone who enters doesn’t return and the border is growing. The team in the movie includes the biologist Lena, the psychologist Ventress, and the scientists Josie, Cass and Anya. Together they enter the Area, and they find mutant lifeforms like these colorful growths, and strange hybrid creatures, like a plant with different species of flower, an alligator with teeth like a shark, and a man with slithering snake-like guts.

There are plants growing in human shapes, and a mutant bear creature that speaks with Cass’ voice after it kills her. So, the Area makes new lifeforms by merging existing ones together. But there’s also duplication, making copies of things – there’s a mutant deer that mimics another deer’s movement. There’s a double of Lena, which copies her movement and her face. And we learn that Lena’s husband Kane who returned from Area X is actually an alien copy of the real Kane, who committed suicide. The Area duplicates other stuff too. Like, by the end of the movie, Lena gets a tattoo that she didn’t have at the beginning. It starts out as a bruise, but develops into this ouroboros design – a copy of the same tattoo on Anya and on this dead guy.

The ouroboros symbolizes a cycle of life and death. There’s also a house in Area X that looks just like Lena’s place back home. So, the Area doesn’t just duplicate animals, it duplicates images, and even places based on memories. The Area affects light and radio and magnetism, it affects the team’s minds, it even affects time – the team loses a few days at the start. So, the Area distorts, duplicates, merges, mutates, and creates in a process Josie calls refraction. And it all seems to come from some alien presence in this lighthouse. The movie shows that it’s extraterrestrial – there’re shots of a meteor coming from space and hitting the lighthouse.

We don’t know what the alien wants, or if it wants at all – the movie suggests it’s like a cancer, unthinking cells that just grow and spread. So, while the alien in this movie represents growth, the humans represent self-destruction. Ventress says “almost all of us self-destruct”, it’s “coded into us”. Each character hurts themselves somehow – Josie cuts herself. Anya is “an addict”. Ventress has cancer, and enters the Area as a sort of suicide. Lena has an affair with her douchey work colleague who she hates, which hurts her relationship with her husband Kane who she loves. And Kane knows about Lena’s affair, which might be partly why he volunteered for a dangerous mission to Area X. Even this tattoo represents self-destruction – it’s a snake eating itself – destroying itself.

So, the humans in this movie self-destruct – and this is actually how they beat the alien in the end. Lena gives a grenade to the alien double that’s mimicking her – she teaches it to blow itself up. And the alien learns this self-destruction, because that’s is its function – to duplicate and assimilate. It assimilates its own annihilation. So – the double burns, and takes the lighthouse and Shimmer down with it. Humanity beats the alien not through heroics or strength, but through our own flaws and weakness. At the end of the movie, Lena reunites with Kane, who she now knows is actually an alien clone. And the Kane asks whether she is really Lena.

The movie ends with Lena’s eyes glowing bright, which implies some kind of alien juju. So maybe this Lena is actually an alien clone. Maybe the Shimmer didn’t really fall, it just expanded to include the whole world. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, but this Lena probably is the real Lena. Cause we saw the mimic Lena burn, and the real Lena had been infected with glowing mutation from early on – the glow’s nothing new. So, the ending might not mean that Lena is an alien, it means that human Lena has changed.

She taught the alien how to self-destruct – maybe the alien taught her to grow. So, the movie’s an exploration of life and death, growth and change. The book explores similar ideas, but the stories quite different. Like, Area X in the book doesn’t create much new mutant life – it’s more about assimilation. People who enter the Area are transformed to become part of the natural environment – so there’s a dolphin with a human eye, and a fox made of human cells, as well as these creepy plant people. The Area absorbs everything into itself, and it spreads, by expanding its border, and by sending out clones to replace humans.

The mimicry and doubling are maybe like a “camouflage” used to hide its slow growth to replace everything with an alien copy. And the book hints at a kind of intelligence behind this. Like, in the movie, the lighthouse has a spooky H. R. Giger alien basement, but the book has a whole tunnel structure separate to the lighthouse. It’s like an alien upside-down copy of the lighthouse. And it has a long spiral staircase descending down, with a fungus forming words on the walls. It reads “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner, I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead” and it goes on and on like that. It’s as though the alien is trying to absorb human ideas as well as human bodies.

The spiraling shape of the words looks kind of like DNA. And the border is like a cell wall, a membrane. So, the whole Area seems kind of like a biological cell. Which lends itself to the cancer metaphor – a tumor growing on the world. In the book, none of the characters have names – they’re just called the biologist, the psychologist, anthropologist and surveyor. Their relationships are colder, and suspicious. The psychologist uses hypnotism to control the others – makes them forget things, and limits what they see.

The government agency, the Southern Reach, is super mysterious and manipulative. They lie to the group, withhold information – it’s almost like they’re experimenting on the expedition members as much as on the Area. And the protagonist, the biologist, is a complicated, highly introverted character – she’s sometimes an unreliable narrator who misleads the reader. So, the book is super psychological, tense and paranoid. But it’s also about the environment.