Annihilation (2018) - Alex Garland

[Lorde X]

Uma explicação do significado do filme muito interessante e que liga certos aspectos sob a ideia do "cancro":

(Atenção que, naturalmente, contém muitos spoilers!)

‘Annihilation’ Explained: Unpacking Alex Garland’s Brilliant, Trippy Sci-Fi Horror Film
by Matt Goldberg - January 4, 2019
(in https://collider.com/annihilation-movie ... ed/#cancer)

Movies are not mystery boxes. There is no “answer” because art isn’t a game or a puzzle to be solved. It’s subjective, so it’s open to interpretation. Great art invites interpretation, not by being needlessly obtuse, but by encouraging the viewers to explore certain ideas and concepts that are presented in a unique way.

Alex Garland’s new sci-fi film, Annihilation, is great art. It’s also a movie that’s bound to frustrate and infuriate some viewers who believed they were getting a sci-fi action movie and instead got Tessa Thompson sprouting leaves and people getting attacked by a bear with human screams. It’s horrifying, but in a specific way. However, like last year’s mother!, Annihilation exists largely in the realm of metaphor. It’s meant to put you in the same dreamlike state of the characters, offering explanations for what’s happening, but also never announcing its themes as it tries to weave subtext into the text.

So what’s exactly happening with Annihilation? It’s a movie about cancer.

annihilation-posterNo one in the movie says, “It’s about cancer,” but it’s clear within the first fifteen minutes that the premise of Garland’s movie is basically, “What if the Earth—that is, the planet itself—got cancer?” And then the movie moves forward from that premise. The “plot” may be about a biologist, Lena (Natalie Portman), who, along with fellow scientists Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez), Sheppard (Tuva Novotny), and Radek (Tessa Thompson), heads into The Shimmer, an unexplained phenomenon, and searching for answers. But the movie is about is cancer, and you can see that consistently throughout.

We immediately get it right from Lena’s first lecture at Johns Hopkins where she talks about cell division, and how cells rapidly divide and mutate. We then cut back three years ago when something struck a lighthouse in the Southern Reach and then it started expanding. The unexplained phenomenon makes a good stand-in for how cancer strikes. Everything is normal, and then it’s not, and in its place is something that’s mutating and, like The Shimmer, expanding. Yes, we can talk about risk factors, but there are perfectly healthy people who still get cancer. It’s not that cancer is inexplicable, but rather our understanding of it is still evolving.

Once Lena and the team are inside the Shimmer, they start noticing mutations, and those mutations stand in for the cancer (the tumor at the heart of the Shimmer) affecting other cells. Garland is basically taking a biological phenomenon and staging something similar to Fantastic Voyage, except instead of the scientists shrinking down to go inside someone’s body, the body they’re investigating is the Earth. Everything gets messed up because of mutations, and as Radek later explains to the group, they’re basically inside of a prism, so everything is refracting. Minds, bodies—everything gets screwed up because that’s what cancer does to a healthy body.

But Garland presents this in a very specific way. It’s not like The Cloverfield Paradox, where anything can happen and nothing is explained so one dude is filled with worms and another dude has a severed arm that offers hints when you’re stuck. Annihilation remains consistent, constantly showing mutations, but mutations as they would occur on a body. Garland wisely abstains from presenting everything as simply gross or beautiful. There’s a calculated indifference. Life grows and mutates, and sometimes you might see something beautiful like the white, skeletal deer with branches for antlers, and sometimes you get ScreamBear, the Bear Made of Screams.

Although Garland loosely adapted Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, certain details bolster the cancer metaphor. For example, the expedition team is all women. From a plot perspective, this is explained by pointing out that previous teams were men, and this could change the results of the expedition. However, it’s also worth noting that the most common form of cancer is breast cancer, which largely affects women.

Additionally, even though all the characters are doctors (admittedly, Thorensen is in kind of a grey area because she’s an EMT) of some kind, the only character referred to repeated as “Doctor” is Dr. Ventress. Although she’s a psychologist by trade, her function in the story has little to do with psychology and more with seeing people go inside The Shimmer and not come out. That wouldn’t be too different from an oncologist who loses a lot of patients. Of course, knowledge is no defense against cancer, and Ventress literally has cancer in the movie.

So how does cancer relate to any of Lena’s flashbacks? In the way that Lena’s self-destruction creates a cancer in her marriage. Lena’s story is basically the heart of the movie. If you cut out her strained relationship with her husband, her guilt over cheating on him, and her desperation to find something that might be able to save him, then you have a movie that’s still fascinating, but also cold. There’s no emotional center to it because you just have five people walking through cancer. Everything in the flashbacks is the humanity that’s tied to each individual—our regrets, our hopes, our dreams. For Lena, her story is about trying to find redemption. That’s why when she talks about trying to rescue Kane (Oscar Isaac), she doesn’t say “I love him.” She says, “I owe him.”

As the movie goes on and we get closer to the Shimmer, we lose Sheppard and Thorensen, and Garland wisely doesn’t make that surprising. He tells us in the opening minutes that those characters die, and then lets us wonder what exactly happened to Radek and Ventress. But the ending for all four characters is basically death of some kind. Radek notes that Ventress “wants to face it” and Lena “wants to fight it”, but she chooses to just accept it. Sometimes people go violently, and others slip away. There’s not a single kind of “cancer death.”

The reason why Annihilation doesn’t stand in for all death goes back to the imagery Garland hits us with throughout the movie. Everything in the movie metastasizes and changes. We get plenty of shots of cells diving. When we see the dead soldier in the swimming pool, his body has basically broken apart and expanded the way a cancer cell would destroy a healthy cell. The Lighthouse itself has a growth highly reminiscent of a tumor. If Garland simply wanted to show “death” in all its forms, he would have used different imagery like blood or ashes. It’s also telling that Ventress, the only character who literally has cancer, goes through the literal definition of annihilation as it relates to physics, “the conversion of matter into energy, especially the mutual conversion of a particle and an antiparticle into electromagnetic radiation.”

So why doesn’t the same thing that happens to Ventress happen to Lena? For the same reason cancer doesn’t kill everyone who gets it. But when we see Lena face off with her alien mirror, that’s a powerful visual representation for cancer. Cancer is both alien and it is in our cells. It’s not an infection or a virus. It’s our own bodies turned against us, which is what happens to Lena in the lighthouse. The only way she’s able to destroy it is with a phosphorous grenade, which may as well stand in for chemotherapy. It’s a destructive force meant to snuff out the alien being that’s also a part of us.

For his part, in an interview at Google, Garland said the movie is about “self-destruction,” and on a metaphysical level, Annihilation certainly has that. Ventress and Lena even have a conversation saying how self-destruction and suicide aren’t the same thing. But if you look at Annihilation as a movie about cancer, then that self-destruction becomes, in a sense, literal. Cancer is a destruction of the self by biological means, and Annihilation shows that self-destruction reflected in the environment. When we think “self-destruction”, we usually think of someone trashing their apartment or drinking heavily. In Annihilation, we see it on a biological level.

The last scene of the movie is the most cryptic where we see Kane, who has recovered, and Lena, back together. She recognizes that this Kane is not her Kane, but likely the copy that was created inside the lighthouse. They’re both “survivors” and he is permanently changed by his experience. When we see The Shimmer in both of their eyes, it’s a reminder that cancer is really never truly exterminated. As this XKCD comic eloquently explains, cancer is always kind of with you no matter what even if you’re “cancer-free.” It also ties back into the nature of their marriage where the basis of their marriage has mutated. They’re different people now, and even if you removed all the sci-fi stuff and simply had a wife reuniting with her husband after cheating on him, and he knew about the infidelity, which is what caused him to leave in the first place, they would be forever changed.

So why not just make a movie about cancer? And why go so broad with “self-destruction”? Perhaps because we tend to get only one kind of cancer movie, which is about the individual cancer patient. And that makes sense because it’s dramatic and its tear-jerking and, sadly, relatable to many people who have seen friends and family stricken with the disease. But what makes Annihilation special is that it wants to confront the cold, uncaring horror of it all. ScreamBear isn’t just a horrifying creation that can rip you apart; it also stands in for the fear of how people will remember your dying moments. The fear of a cancer patient that they’ll be remembered not for who they were, but for their final moments of agony. Yes, there’s a sense of “self-destruction” in that one’s identity is destroyed, but it’s also a specific form of death.

That’s why when Lomax (Benedict Wong), the scientist debriefing Lena, says, “So it was alien,” the line lands with such a thud. Yes, on a literal level, the whole thing is “aliens”, but that term is so broad as to be rendered meaningless, and Garland didn’t make a movie about extraterrestrials. He made a movie about us and the most horrifying thing many of us will confront in some way during our lifetimes.

Of course, this isn’t the only way to read Annihilation. Talking about the movie with friends afterwards, some felt it was about self-destruction while another friend said he thought it was about marriage. My interpretation of Annihilation isn’t to shut out other interpretations, but rather to invite more discussion, which is what makes the movie such great sci-fi. There’s not a single, “This is the answer. Let’s all go home.” It’s a movie that worms its way into your brain and will continue to haunt you long after the Shimmer fades.

E aqui uma explicação mais completa do filme e do seu final:

Annihilation Ending Explained
David Crow - Jan 5, 2019
(in https://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/ann ... -explained)

It stares back at her. Eyeless though it may be, and blankly inhuman as it mimics each of her movements—her nods, her stumbles, and even her violence—it nevertheless stares back at her. That ending to Alex Garland’s Annihilation, in which Natalie Portman faces her double, her shimmering duplicate, and seemingly wins yet doesn’t as her eyes swim with a luminous ripple, is by design a difficult, provocative, and defiant conclusion. In an age of straightforward superheroics in which good conquers evil, here is a genre movie that strives for the mystique of 2001 and the ambiguity of any nightmarish art installation that might mirror what the Shimmer does to your body after the guts are cut open.

It is a perversely profound film and one that demands to be unpacked in many a conversation after it’s over. As we examine that troubling conclusion, and what it means in the larger context of a biologist trapped inside of an ecological and genetic blender, we must take a step back and consider what the movie Annihilation is really about. On the surface, it reflects many of the kind of John Carpenter-esque ‘80s sci-fi thrillers that probably inspired Garland in his youth. However, the film digs deeper than its premise about a woman entering an inexplicable bubble to save her husband’s life. In fact, the film is really about two mysteries: What is the Shimmer, and why would someone dare enter it? To understand the former, we must first consider the latter.

One of the most appealing aspects of Annihilation is that it follows five women, and scientists at that, who are entering a highly dangerous area out of a sense of intense curiosity. Rather than trying to rescue or kill anything particular within the Shimmer—a rainbow-colored blob engulfing Southeastern American marshland—their quest is one of knowledge and basic understanding of the unknown. They’re the wildly optimistic team of nerds you send in after all the Hicks’ and space marines never came back from LV-426. Yet there is more to their inquiry than simply a thirst for knowledge. Even Natalie Portman’s heroine, Lena, and her wish to save the life of her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) is deceptively simple.

As the conflict is framed via flashback from the perspective of a seemingly lone survivor, Lena is out to figure out what is ailing her inexplicably alive husband. The couple’s relationship is revealed via flashbacks-within-flashbacks, which initially suggest a deeply romantic marriage. In other words, she seems desperately relieved to have her great love back in her life when he inexplicably appears in their home 12 months after vanishing into the Shimmer.

Yet like Kane’s probable namesake—John Hurt’s Kane, who was also the first to die after a mysterious recovery in Ridley Scott’s Alien—a happy ending is not meant to be. And while nothing is in danger of bursting out of his chest, the idea that Lena “owes” something to Kane is the cryptically stated motivation that likewise informs her curiosity to enter the Shimmer. It’s slowly revealed that all of the folks who Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) has profiled into entering the Shimmer are driven by more than purely a sense of duty or inquiry. In the case of the film’s central team, it is learned that Ventress herself is sick with cancer, and she is not merely aggrieved that she has sent so many brave men to their presumable deaths. Similarly, Tessa Thompson’s Josie is suicidal due to an existential void in her life, and Tuva Novotny believes she has nothing to lose after the death of her young daughter.

Before we explicitly understand Lena’s own motivation, we are misleadingly given reason to believe we know why Isaac’s Kane signed up for this suicide mission a year earlier. When Lena confronts Dr. Ventress about sending her husband to his death, Ventress curtly suggests that almost no one is suicidal; they’re simply self-destructive. It can come in the form of an urge to drink, smoke, overeat, or even wreck a perfectly happy career or marriage. Up to that point, the flashbacks of Lena and Kane’s marriage depict her as deeply in love with and committed to Kane, and pained by his cryptic and covert disappearances in service to his country. He is choosing his career over their idyllic marriage.
This of course turns out to be a lie. Despite both having been career military, Kane and Lena are quite different, with Lena perhaps mirroring her skeptical scientific peers more than Kane’s good ol’ boy, proper Southern Christian gent. Their disagreements on God also come to mirror their disagreements on the sanctity of their marriage. Lena, as we discover in further flashbacks, is having an affair with a co-worker behind Kane’s back whenever he is gone. While it is never entirely proven, Kane undoubtedly has realized that Lena is cheating on him, and the denial of this bitter truth is driving him to sign up for more reckless missions. That is why he is so stoically reticent on his last morning with his wife, knowing what she’ll be doing while he is gone. And that is what the perceptive Ventress is most assuredly referring to when she talks about a self-destructive impulse shattering a marriage.

Lena may hate herself, and co-worker Daniel, but she sleeps with him anyway, just as Kane enters the Shimmer anyway, knowing it is likely to destroy him—and it does by making him doubt he is even what he considered himself to be: a man. Presumably a happily married one, at that.

The human impulse to destroy ourselves is central to Annihilation, because that is what the Shimmer is doing on an ecological scale. Like humanity, it is mutating and changing at a cellular level what seemed to be a paradise. Our inability to stop what Lena variously compares to “tumors” or “dementia” ravaging this land is intentionally evocative of humanity’s inability to stop the pollution and devastation that has given way to climate change. Entire species and ecosystems are being devastated, and eventually rising temperatures will flood and bury marshland and coastal areas alike beneath the waves… yet, we seem incapable to do anything but watch.

Our collective urge to destroy our environment is echoed in the Shimmer’s sci-fi effects on a coastline, and in Lena’s inability to do anything but let her marriage rot. The guilt of which is why she “owes” Kane, and finds herself in the grips of the Shimmer.

further reading: Annihilation - A Spoiler-Filled Description

Which finally brings us to the end of the movie. The extraterrestrial Shimmer, introduced as a foreign entity from space, has made its home inside of a lighthouse, and as it turns human bodies into exploding fungi sculptures, it has transformed its base into an elephant graveyard of human(ish) bones. The central lair, the Shimmer’s pit of despair, even rather overtly resembles the alien spacecraft architecture that H.R. Giger designed for Alien. So it is fair to say that this is an alien being with at least some form of sentiency, otherwise what happens when it attempts to “double” Lena would never have been possible.

Due to the video tape the real Kane left behind, we come to realize that the Kane who appeared in Lena’s home was an imposter; a biological duplicate of the real man who committed suicide when confronted with a Lovecraftian truth about how artificial his self-identity is. While the effects of the Shimmer manifest in different ways the further away from the lighthouse you are (kind of like a bad WiFi signal), causing some creatures to have simple mutations and others to swap genetics by even the slightest touch, inside the Heart of Reflective Darkness, it actually is able to create an exact replica of its host.

So like Kane before, the Shimmer in all its cosmic glory begins to take the form of Lena, and slowly but surely duplicates everything about the biologist’s physiology, including motions that begin to resemble modern interpretive dance (or at least a Harpo and Groucho Marx routine). We learn from Lena’s narration with fellow scientists after the fact that she came to the conclusion that the Shimmer does not wish to “destroy” or even truly annihilate Earth; it wants to change it. However, as Dr. Ventress told Lena, it is an entirely human phenomenon to seek, intentionally or not, self-destruction. That impulse, to seek annihilation, is within us at a biological level.

And so it is that by duplicating the genetics of Lena, the Shimmer not only doubles her physicality, but also her psychology: It is Lena’s urge to destroy her marriage, to enter the Shimmer, to continue on to the lighthouse when others want to turn back, which compels the Shimmer to, in essence, commit suicide. Fueled by Lena’s violence and anger after she flees the lighthouse, her double does in actuality what Lena already did in spirit; she burns her home down. And so also like a species destroying the planet that gave it life, the double casts fire to the belly of the beast, seemingly destroying all of the Shimmer that has spent years growing in size and complexity.

further reading: Annihilation - From Suburbia to Psychedelia

Within minutes, the human desire for self-destruction has caused the Shimmer to seemingly destroy itself. That is what allows Lena to live. Of course, this being a genre movie, there is a twist. Despite knowing that the Kane in isolation is not her real husband, Lena seeks him out for an embrace in the movie’s final moments before revealing that there’s something aglow, and we’d dare say shimmering, in her eyes. In traditional sci-fi/horror parlance, this is the “twist” to reveal the Shimmer is not gone. Yet there might be some real significance here too. The deeper into the Shimmer’s influence, the easier it is to bleed and blend genetics by a simple touch. This can lead to horrifying results like the bear that rips out Cass’ vocals then absorbing them; or something as graceful as how Josie became one with the foliage.

Yet just as the Shimmer enveloped Lena’s human tendencies, the unknowably alien force’s ambivalent impulse to “create” and “change” is now in Lena. She is not the same woman who entered the Shimmer, and she is able to create something new with this man, who is not her husband. Either that or the bubble is about to start growing again.