2.239. Annihilation Redux

Afterwards, my partner asked me, “Why are you willing to forgive Garland for things in the movie you aren’t willing to forgive Vandermeer for?” She has a point. After all, the book won the Nebula and the Shirley Jackson in 2014. Maybe I’m wrong.

Or, maybe we are all just thirsty for wonder.

Annihilation is the first book in Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy. It is told by an unreliable narrator and, for all intents and purposes lays a form of ground rules for the trilogy at large–giving us pieces of a puzzle that we can (supposedly) later decipher. Kim Stanley Robinson, who I respect, writes that the book “reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world.” That is an awful lot of name dropping there to speak of a story that, in my opinion, isn’t.

The book focuses on a handful of characters who are not named and in fact the narrative works extremely hard to make those characters two dimensional. They are relevant only in their role vs. their selves. In truth the only character given any true depth in the story is the world itself. We see the world beyond the bright (in the movie it is the shimmer) as a living thing; both deuteragonist and antagonist as the POV character makes her way across a reshaping world.

The movie plays off this and plays on the skillset of director Alex Garland, who brings his skillset for beauty and synchronicity to the big screen in a very big way here. It is easy to fall in love with how beautiful everything in the movie is. Likewise it is easy to fall in love with how beautiful some passages from the book are. In both cases we tend to forget that there is not a lot of story there being told and we are learning absolutely nothing about the character. I would argue there is no arc.

Maybe I’m just being a writer (read: hater) but I think that yeah, I give Garland a pass for beauty, but the source material just isn’t that hot.