Even the darkness seemed more alive to me, surrounding me like something physical. I
can't even say it was a sinister presence There's so many beautiful ways that people have interpreted the mysterious Area X of Annihilation, but really these are just our attempts at pulling our own personal meanings out of the jaws of a total cosmic indifference. A constant, overpowering reminder that life is forever neutral. I love that these stories dramatize this concept by pitting humanity against evolution itself. Area X mutates and copies everything
within it at impossible speeds. Alligators bite with the teeth of sharks. Human intestines slither like snakes. In the movie at least, we learn a bit about how this happens, but we don't know why. Area X is beyond meaning. It makes the concept of purpose itself seem tiny and frail. Everything we thought we knew about our place in the hierarchy of the universe and even our own planet is disintegrated within its borders. Our fear of it is expressed in a stupor instead of a scream. The soggy fading awareness of being absorbed into a larger ecosystem which doesn't know your name or your fears or your dreams. Area X can't be properly observed or theorized about by its visitors because to enter Area X is to become Area X. The only constant is change. The only dogma is oblivion. Even if you believe in some kind of higher power and you don't think life is random, I think these are important
questions to grapple with. The complete oblivion of the self is actually a central tenet of so many different religions. Faith is about embracing how small you are and bowing before something too big to comprehend. The Buddhist Shobogenzo says "Forgetting oneself is opening oneself." The Christian Bible says "I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." The Quran says "The creation of the heavens and earth is greater than the creation of mankind, but most of the people do not know. "If God didn't want us to make peace with emptiness, God wouldn't be so quiet. "If we can't make peace, we self-destruct. Annihilation is all about this pressure. "But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You will see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you and you become lost in your thoughts, apart from the panic of realizing
the size of that imagined leviathan." Welcome to Acolytes of Horror, where we examine the horrors of life, through the horrors of film. My name is Nathan and tonight i'm scared of the Alex Garland movie and Jeff VanderMeer novel Annihilation. Spoilers for the book and movie ahead, although I do try to be pretty vague about the details of the book's plot because I'd love it if this video inspired some of you to check it out. Now as we'll soon see, there are drastic differences between the book and the movie but where i think they differ most is how the two stories rage against this giant uncaring force of change. Both of the protagonists find some twisted measure of peace by surrendering to Area X, but the movie highlights the importance and struggle of maintaining relationships in the face of this indifference; the book is more about control. Control over nature, other people, and your own
mind. We'll start with the film. It will always depress me that Paramount Pictures cut the knees out from under this movie because the guy who greenlit Geostorm and Terminator Genysis complained after a poor test screening that it was "Too intellectual." They didn't really market it all that aggressively and premiered it in American, Chinese, and Canadian theaters only just one week after the premiere of another little sci-fi film called Black Panther. For everyone else, it was a straight-to-Netflix deal at a time when the most recent sci-fi Netflix movie in the public's memory was The Cloverfield Paradox. Now I will agree it's it's not a "perfect" movie. Tessa Thompson and Gina Rodriguez do some awesome stunts that you cannot really see at all. This jump scare feels like it belongs in a different, less creative movie. Really, just the gator fight in general is probably the weakest part of the movie. It's cool that they use a real alligator prop and it looks great when it doesn't have to move too fast, but when the action speeds up, they wind up having to cut around way too much. This shot is awesome, by the way. I don't understand why Cassie's body didn't get eaten, and I wish all their different occupations were used more. Really, only Lena and Josie get to do any science stuff, and everyone else might as well just be soldiers. Seems like a missed opportunity, especially when the book uses everyone's specific expertise really well. I can see how this movie could have confused people, even though it really does bend over backwards to try to explain most of what's going on - WAY more than the book does. It was actually really funny doing research for this because half the critics praised the film for not spoon feeding the audience, while the other half criticized it
for relying too heavily on exposition. But I certainly wouldn't say it was "Too
intellectual," or "Too cerebral" I assume is what he meant. Really, for a High Concept Science Fiction Cosmic Horror Movie About The Impossibility Of Ever Having Any Clear
Answers To Life's Biggest Questions.... it leaves me feeling bizarrely comforted. This is the rare horror movie that's about love as much as it's about fear. Or maybe I should say, it's about how letting love into your life opens the door for fear. The difficulty of holding onto each other even as you both self-destruct. But the movie also concludes that no matter how much it may mutate, that connection is worth it. Now, before I gush on and on about how inspiring i find this movie i'd be negligent in calling this a deep dive if i didn't also cover the accusations of
whitewashing that have been leveled at this film. (Sounds of white folks furiously typing in my comments section) In the novels, the biologist is of asian descent and the psychologist is of indigenous descent, and the latter's connection to the land which Area X kinda/sorta colonizes is fairly significant. Now to be fair, their heritage isn't revealed until the second novel, which hadn't come out yet when Alex Garland wrote the screenplay, but it HAD come out when they were casting it. I'm just going to pop up his statement about it if you want to pause and check it out. I have no reason to think he's lying, although i do personally suspect that there might be another factor that, because of workplace politics, he's not
sharing that probably goes something like: "Getting a superstar like Natalie Portman onboard went a long way towards convincing studios to greenlight our weirdo movie." All I'll say about it is that, while it's great to see Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh putting in some career-best performances, somebody else like Sandra Oh could have knocked it out of the park, and it would have been especially cool if they'd made the extra effort to find an indigenous actress. Maybe somebody like Julia Jones, since this is one of American cinema's more invisible demographics. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of wonderful performances by people of color in this movie, but i think being more inclusive in the casting of the two meatiest roles in the movie might have gone a long way towards enhancing the beauty and complexity of this film's meditations on human connection. On the subject of human connection,
the movie begins with a reunion. Lena is struggling to move on after her
husband Kane never came back from a mysterious, highly-classified mission a year ago --
until he walks right into their bedroom. This moment always gets me. Right here, where she simply whispers "Hey," and he doesn't respond. She knows something is wrong, but she can't confront it yet. She just embraces him because she wants to ride the momentum of this wave of joy for as long as it lasts, because it isn't going to last long. Kane doesn't know how he got back. He barely knows where he is or who she is or who HE is. We later learn Kane was
duplicated in Area X and it's unclear who died and who returned, or if there's even a difference at this point. "Was that you? Were you me?" "You're not Kane." "I don't think so." But i love that right before death, he tells his double "You ever
get out of here, you find Lena." And he does. Even though Lena is kind of this abstract concept to him at this point, he comes back. He doesn't remember how he got there, and he's left so much of himself behind, but he comes back. All that's left of him is his connection to Lena. Kane collapses, and Lena finds herself volunteering to follow in his footsteps through the light-bending border they call the Shimmer, into Area X with a group of strangers -- soldier-scientists like herself. At first, things go about as well
as one could reasonably hope. Everyone's scared, but they explore and stay focused on their mission to reach the lighthouse at the epicenter of Area
X. They work well together, and even put themselves in danger to save each other's lives. Over time, Area X has a corroding influence on their minds, but I think it's significant that the group doesn't start to fall apart until after the most empathetic member dies. All we really know about Cassie's backstory is that her daughter died of leukemia, and there's so many moments where you see what a great mother she must have been. "She's very smart." "You hurt?" "I think you're doing okay." Cassie's abrupt and grisly death nearly splits the group. Anya and Josie want to go back home, and Lena lies to them to keep everyone together. Anya in particular grows more terrified
and unstable with every passing scene, especially after they learn about
how Area X is changing their own DNA. But it's her discovery that Lena is keeping secrets from them that pushes her over the edge. This scene... The decision to have the women's mouths be gagged works so well here. In earlier drafts of the script this played out as more of a conversation, but it's so much better leaving Anya alone to fester in her own paranoid thoughts. Gina Rodriguez does incredible work here. There's such a wide spectrum of terror, doubt, paranoia, and betrayal feeding off of each other, unchecked by any other, more rational voices. This creeping conviction accumulates... No one can be trusted. The only way to save herself is to kill them all. At least, until Cassie gets a word in. Her last agonizing moments have been captured by the beast that killed her. When Anya lets it in, they all self-destruct shortly after. Anya dies trying to save the ones she nearly killed. It's a horrible death. The one who couldn't cope with her shifting identity is the one who gets her face ripped off; tongue wiggling like a slug out of an open hole where her mouth used to be. Ventress leaves them behind to chase the lighthouse on her own. Josie vanishes into the green, her old signs of pain replaced by vines for veins. Lena is left sobbing and soldiering through the woods, totally alone. "Almost none of us commit suicide and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives, but these aren't decisions they're impulses. Isn't self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?" Out of all the hundreds of millions
of cells that have made up our bodies, it just takes one of them to make a mistake for it to become cancerous. Or is it self-destruction? Cancer occurs when a cell refuses to die. When instead of letting go, it lingers and multiplies. This film is about how self-destruction SPREADS. We learn through a series of flashbacks that Lena had an affair, and that this affair was likely a big reason why Kane volunteered to go into Area X in the first place. But even in the flashbacks, we only see her ending the affair. "You know, it's not me you hate. It's yourself." "No Dan, it's you too." In the present day, she's staying far away from even a friendship with her former lover. That one little cancerous impulse has grown so large that her whole life is lived in its shadow. She's still stuck in the house where she used to meet him, its emptiness a cold reminder that she drove her husband to his death So much is made of the ending of this movie; how the old lena has made way for something new, but the old lena was destroyed
long before we ever met her. Lena says she's going into Area X to rescue her husband, but she has to know how unlikely it is that she'll survive, much less find some
miracle cure. This feels less like atonement than another way to punish yourself. "I guess there had to be something." "What do you mean?" "Volunteering for this? It's not exactly
something you do if your life is in perfect harmony." She destroyed her life with her affair, so now she's going to keep destroying it. The first difference that a fan of the movie
will notice about the book is that when it begins we're already deep within Area X. Alex Garland pitched the film as "A journey from suburbia to psychedelia" and the movie really stays true to this idea of starting somewhere familiar and ending somewhere you can't fathom. Going from a recognizable, objective world to a surreal, subjective one. But the book never gives us that chance to find our footing. If the movie tries to fight Area X with human connection, the book dwells on the flaccid fruitlessness of control. Nobody understands Area X, so they can't control it. Instead, they try to control everything else. The shadowy government organization called the Southern Reach tries to control the group, the group tries to control each other, and the
biologist tries to control her own body and mind. All of these attempts fail spectacularly. The
Southern Reach is arguably every bit as random and dangerous as Area X. Its faceless, manipulative presence feels like just as much of an unstoppable force of nature. So much of what the Southern Reach tells them turns out to be lies, and they're not even lies that hide a larger truth because they don't know the truth. They're just lies aimed at keeping everyone calm, predictable, and compliant. It creates this dynamic where the mission is secondary to enforcing obedience. Even though they're all scientists, individual thought seems like it's more of a potential problem than a solution. The expedition members are labeled only by their occupations. Instead of Lena, the narrator is only called the biologist. Instead of Ventress, she's the psychologist. "We were always strongly discouraged from using names. We were meant to be focused on our purpose, and anything personal should be left behind. Names belong to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X." An atmosphere of paranoia festers under the surface of every interaction especially when the biologist learns that the psychologist is using hypnotic commands to secretly keep everyone under her control. The group was told that they had to be in a hypnotized state to safely pass through Area X's border - or what the film calls the Shimmer - so they allowed the Southern Reach to condition their minds to the psychologist's hypnosis. Unbeknownst to them, they'd also been conditioned to obey a series of hypnotic phrases. Even their training turns out to be a trap. "'There's no reward in the risk of all of us going down,' the psychologist said, and from the inflection i recognized a hypnotic command. The surveyor's grip on her rifle loosened, the
features of her face became somehow indistinct for a moment. 'You're right,' the surveyor said.
'Of course you're right. It makes perfect sense.'" Later, the biologist discovers that
one of the hypnotic words is... This obsession with control actually
only intensifies the anarchy, making humanity out to be this kind of
accidental chaotic neutral force all on our own. A force whose power is completely and pathetically swallowed by Area X. The only reason the biologist kinda/sorta/mostly survives is because she
surrenders her humanity. To put things simply, she breathes some spores in the first chapter,
which begins a book-long transformation that could either be described as body horror or
enlightenment, depending on how important you perceive the human mind to be. Immediately, she finds herself immune to the psychologist's commands. Later this will save her life,
but for now it makes her feel vulnerable. Like a threat that, if detected, might be
wiped out. "I now hid not one but two secrets, and that meant I was steadily, irrevocably
becoming estranged from the expedition and its purpose." The group turns on each other and goes their separate ways much earlier in the book. By the end of chapter 2, the biologist is totally
alone. Unlike Lena, that's just the way she likes it. "Some part of me too, no matter how I had
tried to convince the surveyor to come with me, welcomed the chance to explore alone. To not be dependent on or worried about anyone else." Unlike Lena, the biologist wants to be here.
She doesn't even mention her husband was on the previous expedition until page 55. "How I wish now, even though it was always impossible, that in the end I had gone to Area X for him. I loved him, but I didn't need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be." The biologist has always had a hard time with people. She's more comfortable hunkered down somewhere in nature, blissfully alone. Kane volunteers for Area X at least partly because he finds out about Lena's affair, but the biologist cheats in a stranger way. She often goes out in the middle of the night and refuses to tell her husband where she's going, which turns out to be an overgrown empty
lot to watch the foxes, nighthawks, mice, and owls that live there. "I needed to be selfish about that patch of urban wilderness. It expanded in my mind while i was at work, calmed me, gave me a series of miniature dramas to look forward to. I didn't know that while i was applying
this Band-Aid to my need to be unconfined, my husband was dreaming of Area X and much greater open spaces." But her attempts at escape are really just her own attempts at control.
Nature makes sense to her and people do not, so she tries to disappear into these wilder
ecosystems, which is what she ultimately does in Area X. What I love so much about the prose
in this book is the way we experience this unfathomable place from the perspective of someone so obsessed with categorization and analysis. She's someone who uses the scientific method as a kind of coping mechanism, reacting to the ever-expanding uncanny with experimentation and hypothesis. "There was no way i could corroborate any of these theories, but i took a grim comfort in coming up with them anyway." But more data only leads to more questions, and by the end, all we're left with are theories. Even the next two books in the ol' Triple-A Trilogy aren't really direct sequels so much as extra layers of context. There are some answers to be found here, but they mostly just add onto the pile of questions. All attempts at quantifying Area X lead to
madness, but the southern reach keeps trying without any apparent expectation of success. "I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless. If I don't
have real answers, it is because we still don't know what questions to ask." Everyone that the Southern Reach sends into Area X is asked to keep a journal. The book itself is the biologist's journal, and one of the more haunting images of the book for me is when she finds a giant mound of journals festering in some dark, forgotten room. "The journals and other materials formed a moldering pile about 12 feet high and 16 feet wide that in places near the
bottom had clearly turned to compost, the paper rotting away. So many needing so much to communicate what amounted to so little." She tries to sort through some of them but each journal contains only contradictory ramblings and more questions. Everyone is experiencing Area X in different ways. "All this useless knowledge." In Annihilation, the written word is a harbinger of insanity instead of education. They find words written on the walls of this gaping tunnel going straight down into the ground which the biologist can't help but compulsively think of as a Tower. It's a nonsense run-on sentence spiraling down the walls, deeper and deeper, written not with ink or paint but with living creatures. A swaying forest of fungi whose babbling sentences fascinate
and unravel all who read it. As if sentences were ribbons that one could pull and reveal the
quivering fear underneath our civilized, logical wrappings. The spores that infect the biologist are sprayed by the fungi living in these words. Her compulsion to read, to observe, to
KNOW betrays her -- or does it save her? Over the course of the novel, she transforms. Her skin literally taking on a phosphorescent glow. She calls it her "brightness".
"Everything was imbued with emotion, awash in it, and I was no longer a
biologist, but somehow the crest of a wave, building and building
but never crashing to shore." Thinking is replaced by feeling.
The progression of her brightness is only slowed when she's shot by one of her
former companions. The act of healing her temporarily reverses the process.
"To keep the brightness in check, I would have to continue to become wounded. To be injured. To shock my system." How violently is she prepared to cling to her own humanity? What are all those answers really worth? A lot of folks have compared Annihilation to Andre Tarkovsky's science fiction masterpiece Stalker, another film about
people attempting to navigate a beautiful and dangerous place where the normal rules
of nature don't apply. Jeff VanderMeer has pushed back against this comparison, and
I understand his frustration, because i think the ways it's different from stalker
are more interesting than its similarities. Both expeditions reach the heart of these
places only to find more questions than answers, but the stalker's trips into the Zone are attempts
at spiritual enlightenment. Entrance into a room at the heart of the Zone will fulfill the visitors
deepest desires, although discovering just what those desires are can often be devastating. So
while the Zone is similar to Area X in that it's beyond humanity's comprehension and demands that its visitors surrender to it, ultimately the Zone is in service to the self. When you surrender
to Area X, your sense of self is annihilated. You're broken apart and put back together and you'll never know why because this vast force of nature doesn't know or care how you feel
about it. Chronologically, the beginning of the film is the end of the film, when we would
normally expect all the loose ends to be tied up, and what do we get? "I don't remember." "I
don't know." "I don't know." "The tower, which was not supposed to be there plunges into the earth..." From the first nine words of the book, our characters are confronted with a structure that months of training and preparation have no explanation for. The Tower is a gigantic structure that wasn't on any of their maps and appears to have been created by Area X itself. From the
start, We're confronted with a mystery so huge that the idea of it ever being explained feels
impossible. In the novel, this tower winds up being far more important than the lighthouse. It's a bottomless pit of mystery that the biologist can't stop obsessing over. "I lay awake in my
tent for awhile, trying to turn the Tower into a tunnel or even a shaft, but with no success.
Instead my mind kept returning to a question: What lies hidden at its base? That need for
answers is what Lena, the biologist, and the audience ultimately have to leave behind. These stories lend themselves to this very meta-textual lens that always makes me think about our
temptation to conquer art instead of letting art conquer us. It's so easy to trap ourselves in the prison of plot rather than braving the freedoms of theme and ambiguity. We compulsively concoct all these tidy answers for every last little plot question as if we were collecting achievements in a video game. All too often I think we forget that our most meaningful moments come from experiences that language is helpless to articulate. At the end, Lena comes face-to-face with the unknowable. The editing has this shot/reverse-shot pattern, as if they're having some kind of conversation that's deeper than words. You can't explain this moment. You just have to feel it. At the end, the biologist comes face-to-face with the unknowable. "The Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to mock my ability to comprehend it. My eyes kept glancing off of it as if an optic nerve was not enough." There's no fighting, there's no escaping. "With just one more step away as I began to choke, I realized that the light had become a sea somehow, even though i was not truly underwater, I was drowning. I was pinned there now by
the Crawler, had let it in, I realized, so that its full regard was upon me, and I could not move, could not think, was helpless and alone. "Perhaps my only real expertise, my only
talent, is to endure beyond the endurable." I've been thinking about the end of the world
a lot lately. It's important to stay vigilant and keep advocating for solutions, but as of this writing my state's been on fire for over a month. The air itself is orange. I'm scared of the
reckoning that we're all about to live through, but what scares me the most is this image
I have of a charred earth devoid of life, empty and without purpose. But
then i think about New Zealand glowworms. In their larval state, they drop lines of silk soaked in sticky mucus from cave ceilings, their backsides lighting the dark into
a galaxy of glowworms to attract prey. When insects get stuck, all they can do is wait as the glowworm slowly reels it up to its doom. I guess this isn't a super hopeful example,
because as far as climate change goes I personally relate more to the insect than the
glowworm, but from a more cosmic point of view, the bizarreness of the glowworms' biology reminds me that no matter how hostile the environment is or how long it takes to adapt, life really does
find a way, it's not just a quote. Earth has survived meteors, at least five ice ages, and
not to mention its own volcanic creation. It'll survive us too. Evolution is endlessly creative
and it'll keep making horror and beauty for as long as space and time exists. Right before her death, Ventress says the world will be refracted by Area X into its smallest parts until nothing is left, but then her starry remains fill the room. To her it feels like annihilation, but to us it's the big bang. Cells will keep multiplying, suns will keep exploding. If you zoom out far enough, annihilation is just a part of creation. Lena survives because she surrenders to the unknown. She rejects Anya and Ventress's inability to let go, instead embracing Josie's acceptance and Cassie's empathy. These relationships were temporary, but they've become a permanent part of her just as much as Area X. She submits, not as one would to a deity, but as one submits to getting out of bed every morning. She lets Area X touch and learn from her. She teaches it self-destruction. "I don't know why except that, having scanned and sampled me and having - based on some unknown criteria - released me, the Crawler no longer displayed any interest in me." The biologist survives because she surrenders to the unknown. Her husband's been absorbed into its ecosystem and she follows in his footsteps, rather than follow the Tower all the way to the
very bottom. She BECOMES Area X, and the last line in the book is one of peaceful acceptance. "I am not returning home." Lena does come home. You could read her final confrontation as a fight against trauma, guilt, doubt, depression, ego, cancer, self-destruction, and probably
plenty of other things I haven't thought of. Anything in your head or body that won't give you peace. But no matter what your inner monster is, the solution is the same. To quote
an earlier draft of this screenplay: You have to accept it, because it's there. I love the opening shot of this movie, because Lena is just as confused as everyone else, but she's the only one in the room who isn't afraid anymore. She stared into the void and kept going.
Her posture is open, shoulders back, eyes forward. "Observing all of this has quelled the last ashes of the burning compulsion to KNOW everything... anything... and in its
place remains the knowledge that the brightness is not done with me. It is just beginning, and
the thought of continually doing harm to myself to remain human seems somehow pathetic." It's always so funny to me when, after over 10 minutes of this transcendent experience, the first words we hear is the interrogator going 'Oh so it WAS an alien!' and Lena doesn't really say anything
because at this point in her journey that question feels so pointless. Lena has evolved. Not for
the better or worse, she's just different. So is Kane. It's so easy to fear those shimmering eyes and the uncertain future they represent and so hard to remember that the film also ends with an embrace. The world might be forever neutral, but that means hope is just as likely as despair. Surrender can bring victory alongside defeat. Heaven alongside hell. Survival is change.
Control is chaos. Annihilation is creation. "It was dreamlike." "Nightmarish?" "Not
always. Sometimes it was beautiful." Hey! Thanks so much for checking out my video! I hope you all really liked it. It's been a blast to work on. I love how this movie blends
the the fear of the unknown with the beauty of the unknown, you know? And i couldn't think
of a better movie to end off the year with. This will be the last video of this year. I'm in
the middle of a really big move right now that's just consuming my life and probably won't get back in my regular workflow until January, but thank you so much to all of you who have just
kind of gotten in on the ground floor of this thing this year. The channel has just exploded and it's just been awesome to hear from all of you. I especially want to thank those of you who
donated on Paypal even just like a few dollars here and there. It means so much to me that
this project means that much to some of you all. Thank you very much, the link's in the description below if you'd like to support my work further. Like i said it's the last video of
the year but just to tease next year, some of the projects i'm debating on covering: Blue Velvet, The Dead Don't Die, The Love Witch, David Firth's work, maybe Rocky Horror
Picture Show, the Hannibal series. I don't know just so many awesome projects that i'm kind of picking at here and there and I can't wait to see like which one really takes and inspires me to go all the way with it. Let me know in the comments if you feel one way or the other,
Who knows? Maybe it'll impact my decision somehow. Before I go I really wanted to shout out this
awesome video. If you liked my Midsommar video, I think you'll really like this one. It's called a
"Midsommar: How Horror Misunderstands Paganism" by Emiloid. It's such a comprehensive dive into that subject. Emily - who's the host of Emiloid - is a practicing pagan, so it's just really cool
to hear her perspective and she has this this really great matter-of-fact delivery that makes for very clear-eyed analysis but there's also this sardonic edge to it that i think is
really entertaining. Yeah like i said it's a great video and also one of my favorite parts about it, it's not all critical, she she spends a good deal of time talking about a few movies that she thinks approaches paganism in an interesting way. Movies like the wicker man and Equus. Just check it out, I think you'll really like it, and before I go: I can't end this video without mentioning this
thing, it's in my head. Annihilation, right? The bear that attacks the expedition
it has some aspects of like a wild boar, right? And this bear-pig thing speaks with a human voice sometimes... y'all... That's manbearpig!
Thank you for sharing this!
I don't know if that's included in this, but this one's 1:13:06 long. It's amazing.