The new (-ish, as in, this year, but I don’t buy movie tickets anymore) Annihilation movie is a beautiful adaptation that really does mutate the source material – see Emily Hughes, who so smartly put it, “How much can you change something before it’s a different creature? The novel asks that question, and the movie embodies it” – but the most significant level at which the material changes has less to do with whether or not we get the Wall-Creeper or any other particular plot point – it’s that it changes the central themes around what Area X means to us.
In Jeff VanderMeer’s text, Area X’s origin or purpose are never explained. The source of its power remains numinous and alternatively alluring and terrifying throughout the entire trilogy, and our characters are therefore drawn more into an existential crisis than a discrete conflict with it. The books do for sci-fi, in a way, what Paul Auster does for mystery, where it’s less of a who-dun-it and more of a did-anyone-do-it, was-it-even-dun, and who-are-we-in-light-of-the-ambiguity-surrounding-the-dunning-of-it. The questions are never answered in Area X, we just watch the characters change and question themselves and their world as they cope with something too strange and powerful for them to understand. It’s got an almost religious dimension that begs us to imagine ourselves vulnerable to its higher power. It’s a delicious subversion of genre in this way.
There are, of course, elements of that world left in Alex Garland’s adaptation – and I have such respect for this writer/director going back to Ex Machina that I’m inclined to go along for any warped journey he wants to take me on – but it’s a very different beast. We are given a rather straightforward, if incomplete, explanation of what Area X is from the first moments of the film. The Area is destroyed in a somewhat pat and unsatisfying way by the end of the running time, letting our mutated heroine and the eerie, Area-X generated clone of her husband meet again on the other side. But in a supremely satisfying payoff, the last frame of a film features our two leads finding each other both so profoundly changed by Area X that they really don’t identify as Kane and Lena anymore – are, in fact, so deeply mutated that they crave each other all the more for being the last living tokens of Area X left in this world, as Lena embraces the disturbing clone that has taken the place of her husband, and we cut to black.
It’s a revolutionary set of changes to the themes of the book, and frankly just as satisfying in a completely different way. I can’t help but wonder at how this metamorphosis took place, and I’m tempted to guess that it might be more than simple disregard/ambition on the part of the adaptation artist, and more a case study in the difference between film and text. That is, I’m wont to believe that Garland didn’t just read the book and say, this could’ve been cooler if we changed all these plot points. Part of the buzz around this movie at the outset was how potentially unfilmable the book was, spending so much time in a kaleidoscopically shifting subjective perspective just to impress on the reader how the characters were changing as a result of their exposure to Area X. And while I don’t think that makes the book strictly unfilmable – obviously, every drug usage sequence in modern film has figured out the tricks of distorting perspective, sound, light, color to let the viewer know that we’re in someone’s tripped-out head – this movie would have had to live in those kinds of shots for such a dominant portion of its length as to become pretty overwhelming, and to potentially lose a lot of viewers around basic questions of what’s happening, what timeline are we watching, real or imagined, and from what perspective. It may have been too much for a director (or his studio, likely) to handle.
So instead Garland imagines a way to convey the profundity of the changes consuming these characters while keeping the camera’s perspective objective throughout. That’s the tradeoff. And that meant putting these characters in a position where they could make a choice that so perfectly expressed their inner evolution (which is another great example of what it really means to show-don’t-tell at a high level) as to say as much as any amount of subjective perspective could have given you behind the lens. We know exactly how profound the changes affecting Lena are when we watch her embrace her monster-of-a-clone-husband. If we don’t get the payoff of that sequence, we have no idea how much of her is different as we watch Natalie Portman keep looking pretty much like Natalie Portman from objective perspective throughout. It’s an ambitious set of choices on Garland’s part, and one can really imagine how the pressure to translate the text into film gave him the mandate to subvert some central themes of the book in order to serve others.
It’s how he manages that tension – in both serving and subverting the text in order to translate it – that deserves respect and attention. I love this guy, definitely on my short list of high-concept filmmakers who give you something to chew on after the credits roll.