Compare & Review: Annihilation

At the point of writing this, I have only read the first book of the Southern Reach trilogy written by Jeff VanderMeer, which is fine for our purposes today, because per the director of the film, Alex Garland, that was all he had to work with as well, because even the first book titled Annihilation had yet to even be released when work started on the film.

I’ll start with the film. It came out in 2018 and was directed by Alex Garland. Natalie Portman, Tessa Thompson, and Oscar Isaac have roles in the film, and I only mention those three specifically as they are coincidentally all each a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, though for as much as the MCU has been expanding, I suppose that’s less coincidence and more a mathematical probability at this point.

A meteor crashes somewhere near the coast and spawns an area known as “The Shimmering” surrounding it, with the boundary of the zone expanding slowly but surely outward. The government has been trying to explore and study the area, but seeing as how people have never returned from the zone, it’s been quite difficult to do so. Portman’s husband, who was on the last expedition returns to her house unexpectedly, with little to no memory of what happened or how he even got home.

As another expedition is being planned, Portman’s character is taken on. She and four others enter The Shimmer. After a hard cut, the group finds themselves 4 days inside the zone with no recollection of how they got there or how they spent those four days, but they quickly realize that’s only the beginning of the strange things inside the zone. They discover that everything inside is combining and cross contaminating each other to horrendous results, such as an alligator/shark hybrid, a monstrous bear with human vocal cords, and plants that have a suspiciously human form.

The team faces dangerous wildlife and a seemingly hopeless situation until the somewhat anticlimactic ending. It was a neat bit of scenery, and I didn’t hate it, it just oddly didn’t seem as high stakes as the events in the rest of the film. The movie was a great watch, and I would have loved a sequel, unfortunately, it had very little profitability in theaters.

Now for the book. The differences between the film and the book are quite substantial. The book, I would say, is lovecraftian horror while the film tries to stay a bit actiony. The film tells you the event was caused by an extraterrestrial event, whereas the book gives you nothing. It doesn’t say what caused “the event,” and it’s never explained. In the film the protagonist figures out what’s happening inside the zone, but again, the book only begins to describe what might be happening. None of the action set pieces are in the film either, most of it replaced with either a lovecraftian set piece known as “the tower” and the unknowable things inside, or the friction between the expedition members as they try to cope and understand what is going on as they deal with forces outside their understanding. Hypnotism plays a big role on the book as well. That unexplained four-day gap that was in the film? In the book they had been hypnotized to not remember going through the barrier, as apparently it’s some thing so terrible you would not want to remember experiencing it.

The novel gives you no answers. You’re not even sure what the questions are, even by the end of the book. The synopsis of the sequel Authority says it will answer some questions, and I don’t doubt that, as the series was planned as a trilogy from the start, but I am comparing the two versions of Annihilation, and in the end, the book isn't about answers or questions, not even the destination. It’s the journey and the how and why the protagonist, simply referred to as “the biologist” got to where she is and why.

Both book and movie are good, and I would recommend consuming either media version, but they both are quite different. Like trippy visuals and dangerous creatures and man vs wild: the movie is an entertaining watch. Like Lovecraftian horror and a lot of mysteries? Read the book. Seriously. It's a great example of modern Lovecraftian storytelling.