It’s hard to know where to start or how to even describeAnnihilation– part alien invasion film, part surreal mind-bender, part heartfelt melodrama… I was on the set a little over a year ago, spoke with the producers, director, production & art designers, saw the mood boards tracking the story of the film, and watched a particularly tense sequence filmed – and yet even after all of that, I’m still not sure what to expect. This, by the by, is a great thing. There’s an oddness toAnnihilation, something that can’t quite be distilled with mere words; more than anything – the film looks like an experience that needs to be seen to be fully understood. To be honest – I feel a little like Lena (Natalie Portman) herself does in the new trailer, asked to describe something that may well be indescribable.
So, I guess, let’s just start from the beginning.
Annihilationopens in an unnamed small town in the Baltimore suburbs – just your typical suburban middle class home. Lena (Natalie Portman) teaches microbiology at John Hopkins University, while her husband (Oscar Isaac) goes off on various missions for the government. One night – he returns home much worse for wear, but this reunion is cut short as a military team quickly ambushes the couple. Lena is then taken by gunpoint to a military medical research unit, close to a natural park where ‘occurrences’ are said to happen.
Lena’s put into a captivity room, which naturally she escapes from, leading her outside to discover ‘the shimmer’. Around the nearby park, a force field has emerged – alien, definitely not of here – shining a distortion of different lights. The scariest part: the force field seems to be growing at an accelerated rate. It’s not long before Lena, alongside four other women (Jennifer Jason Leigh,Tessa Thompson,Gina Rodriguez&Tuva Novotny), journeys within the force field (known as ‘Area X’) to discover what’s actually going on inside the alien terrain.
And that’s when things really getweird.
Per writer/directorAlex Garland(Ex Machina) – “The first conversation I had when I was meeting actors or having production meetings was that the film is about various things and various themes but the basic underlying principle is the journey from suburbia to psychedelia. We’re going to start in suburbia and end in psychedelia. That was the underlying principle.”
After the team enters ‘Area X’, their equipment begins to malfunction and time itself seems to distort. “At a certain point, it’s not necessarily clear how long they’ve been wandering out there. It may be days or [even] weeks…”
“It’s not about an alien invasion” production designerMark Digbyrevealed, “It’s about something that is mutating and adding a cancer to all of our physicality. That means light waves, electric magnetic waves, vegetables, minerals, animal, DNA, crystal, organic… It’s all been mashed up and it’s all behaving oddly… It’s about an annihilation of our rules of science.”
Within Area X, the team discovers these various mutations – mutated plants, albino alligators, a nastily deformed (and ferocious) bear, and, well, let’s-just say-more…
It took over three years of development untilAnnihilationofficially got the green light into production. “It was a long time,” producerAndrew MacDonaldconfided, “First of all there was the period writing the script. Then the studio changed personnel. Then there was casting of Natalie [Portman]. Then Natalie had some other projects. When she was free though, it was winter - so it was the wrong time. But one of the great positives [is that] we were able to think about the film and contribute ideas. Alex designed and processed everything, so we had a plan that worked. And in that time, we were able to get the rest of the cast right.”
Annihilation, based on the novel byJeff VanderMeer, takes some pretty big deviations from its source material. For one: in the novel, none of the characters are ever given names, simply called by their profession (The Biologist or The Psychologist or The Anthropologist, etc…). For the film though – Garland immediately keyed into giving each character their own name. Per Garland – “In a film with this kind of execution, it would be slightly too arch if they’re saying, ‘Hey, Biologist, come check this out.’ It makes it too other. This film is weird enough.”
Set pieces in the script also changed in relation to what the production team discovered on a trip to the US. “We went to New Orleans and there are people who live on the edge of swamps in trailers,” Digby said, “We came upon a half sunken trailer by the edge of a swamp. It was such a great visual delight – that it’s where the [characters] ended up [in the film]… Originally the alligator attack sequence was outside and happened in the open, but now we put the [characters] in a more dangerous place. It’s dark. It’s enclosed. It’s harder to escape.”
Annihilation, which takes place in the Southern US, was actually shot completely in the UK. According to producer Andrew MacDonald – it didn’t matter because the film isn’t “set in an America you know.” The film set would have to be manufactured anyway – so the producers decided to shoot in an area they’re already familiar in, with a crew they’ve used previously.
McDonald added – “We have a producer friend of ours, he’s South American. We were telling him about this project and he asked how we were going to do the swamp and jungle in England. He has shot in the jungle in South America and he said two things – one, which you might expect as obvious, that it’s very attritional because of the weather and the conditions and because you’re in the jungle. The other thing he said is that when you’re shooting at something so dense, all you’re getting is a green curtain so you can’t really see beyond anything. Actually shooting in something that you can dress has a density but also a separation. Visually it’s been fantastic because you can actually see through and into things. So that section of the film has massively benefited from not being shot in the jungle.”
The journey through Area X, the bulk of the film, was shot in chronological order. First the women travel to the half sunken trailer where they run into the aforementioned alligator; then they move onward to an abandoned military base. It’s there that the group really starts to notice the mutations everywhere. “It’s constantly about [the team] finding natural things that shouldn’t be to the scale, place and color that they’re at,” Digby revealed, “It’s [mostly] subtle until they come to a place where there’s a profusion of it and then they can not escape that there is this massive thing happening.”
The design for these ‘mutations’ was based in our own reality. Per Digby: “Our general design ideology that we share with Alex is to keep everything with a scientific integrity.” For the mutated plants, the production department looked at actual plants from Fukushima and Chernobyl. “You research, you think fantastically and then you discover that nature and reality will trump you always. Ultimately we wanted to feed from what exists in the world - under the sea, microscopic or unnaturally mutated by human intervention.”
Andrew MacDonald re-echoed the sentiment – “Everything needs to feel like it comes from something real. If our world is going a little bit crazy, we tried to base it on things that are in our mutated world as opposed to simple fantastical creations… It’s not Terry Gilliam orDungeon and Dragons. [It’s] sci-fi that is connected to our world, based on reality.”
Garland, though, was quick to note that overallAnnihilationis far less rooted in reality than his previous film. “It’s not the same type of science fiction thatEx Machinawas, which had very explicit concerns about consciousness and AI. This is a much more dreamlike and fractured landscape.”
At the military base, Area X begins to have an effect on each crewmember both physically and mentally. They begin to distrust and turn on one another. From here I’ll be vague as to what happens – but the surviving members journey from an abandoned town, completely overrun by the mutations, to ultimately a lighthouse that may well hold all the answers to what’s happening.
“We wanted to build [the film] from normality to something very strange and earn the strangeness,” Garland stated, “…There’s these moments of propulsion where suddenly you drop down into another level of strangeness and then another level and [we] just keep pushing it.”
Annihilationopens in theaters on February 23rd.Click hereto watch the new trailer, andclick here to read my full, extensive interview with Garland.
