re: 'Annihilation' Tomatometer Score - 90%/ Spoiler Thread

Okay maybe I’m full of shite here but here it goes:

It was all a psychotic break. Only one person went into the shimmer. Each female is a version of the biologist. Her husband, he is KIA. There is no other explanation for sending an all female team.

Movie opens with her teaching a classs, looking at a cell. The cell is cervical cancer. The psychologist has cervical cancer. The tough paramedic has an infinity tattoo on her left forearm, just like the protagonist. One lady lost her daughter to leukemia, but it was the protagonist who lost a daughter. There is a kid’s bedroom that is panned over when they show her house. The physicist is scientific and attempted suicide, our protagonist again.

The lighthouse, symbolism:
Lighthouses symbolize the way forward and help in navigating our way through rough waters whether those waters be financial, personal, business or spiritual in nature.

The lighthouse is therapy. The Asian male
Doctor is the psychiatrist. The burning of the lighthouse is the end of a session where she makes a breakthrough. She is institutionalized. Hugging her clone husband, that’s the start of another psychotic break.

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but since the source of this is at a lighthouse... why didn't they just take a boat?

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I thought Ventress said they tried that and no one came back?

She was an amalgamation of her team. We can believe her story as it was told or it could be a copy of her that inherited her penchant for lying. We saw how real Kane began to gain traits from his team (he had a southern accent in the farewell video), so real Lena could’ve absorbed traits from the others via the refraction. We saw the bruise manifest as early as the boat scene.

Could just as easily be a copy that also took traits from everyone. It’s left pretty perfectly ambiguous; lots of arguments for either side.

Given some of Garland’s comments about th movie, I don’t think it’s quite as heady as your analysis, but it’s still an awesome take nonetheless. Garland said the movie is about self destruction in various forms. The discussions about cancer and single-cell organisms were very telling in what he wants to communicate about the shimmer. Pretty horrifying how the introduction of just one organism can completely alter an ecosystem, for better and for worse. Some scary implications for humanity. And like Lena said, it may not have been a malevolent entity. It “being” is all it took for all the changes to happen.

Like shutter said, the script had its issues and isn’t as tight as Garland’s other scripts, but I’m still comfortable giving it a 4/5 because it excelled at so much. This one will stick with me for a while and I will probably go see it again. An amazing theater experience. It really is like a modern day Stalker

If you watch it again, please keep my silly theory in mind. I’m sure I missed some other stuff on my first viewing. I very well may be way off, but after about 30 minutes post view, this came into focus.

Also keep in mind, she had the same tattoo, child’s room, cervial cancer thing all BEFORE she entered the shimmer. While the shimmer makes everything refract, assigns traits to other things, she possessed all of these things before she “met” the other people. The shimmer Broke apart all of those traits and characteristics inside of her. She was all of them, she did not absorb all of them, but she was all of them.

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Did anyone catch what book she was reading at the beginning of the movie?

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Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

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It makes sense why Lena, of all people, would be drawn to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Lena is a biologist, and Skloot’s book is about the story behind the HeLa cell, a human cell that has the ability to reproduce infinitely. HeLa cells have been incredibly instrumental in furthering science. As the book's prologue reads, HeLa “cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease; and they’ve been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers.” Essentially, these are the most important cells when it comes to medicinal research.

Lena specializes in cell reproduction, so she might be especially shocked by the HeLa cell's dark history. In 1951, a woman named Henrietta Lacks went to the Johns Hopkins hospital to receive treatment for cervical cancer. Without Lacks' knowledge or consent, cells were harvested from her tumor during a biopsy. Scientists found that her cells were remarkable. Up until this point, scientists had been unable to keep cells alive on their own. Lacks’ cells, on the other hand, bred every 48 hours. They were the first immortal cells.

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Henrietta Lacks died the same year those cells were harvested, but her cells have lived on. “One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing,” Skloot writes.

Despite the importance of the HeLa cell, Lacks’ family never received compensation. Skloot’s book reveals the injustices that were done against the Lacks family, and historical exploitation of Black Americans for medical research.

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But how does this discomfiting story tie into the Shimmer, Area X, and a landscape that distorts everything inside it? The key comes in the HeLa cells themselves, which are able to multiply indefinitely, even though other cells could not. HeLa represents a mystery of science on a granular level. What differentiates Lacks’ cells from all the rest?

Annihilation is asking similar questions about the nature of cells. The plants and animals in Area X are strange, because they’ve been tampered with on a cellular level. After passing through the Shimmer, an organism's cells change fundamentally. Organic beings can take new shape. Humans can be regenerated as flowers; bears can take on the voice of a human. Life continues to grow explosively, but differently than it had before.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks shows up in Lena’s hands for a very deliberate reason. The book signals that Annihilation will be a movie about life — and the components that build life up. Annihilation is a reminder that, for all our "civilization," humans can be boiled down to cells, just like the trees we cut down and the deer we hunt. Once the explorers in Annihilation lose their "humanness," their cells get whole new lives.

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She was an amalgamation of her team. We can believe her story as it was told or it could be a copy of her that inherited her penchant for lying. We saw how real Kane began to gain traits from his team (he had a southern accent in the farewell video), so real Lena could’ve absorbed traits from the others via the refraction. We saw the bruise manifest as early as the boat scene.

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This is my belief as well. Like the bear, Lena has absorbed parts of everyone on her team (hence her spontaneously growing a tattoo and the bruise). The Shimmer does not have to destroy, it is bringing about change, or something different. Lena at the end is that something different, she has absorbed all of the team as well as the alien double.

The alien absorbs the tendency to self-destruction of the human DNA, and sets the lighthouse on fire, bringing about her own destruction, but allowing Lena and her husband to move forward.

They are now the Shimmer outside of the Shimmer, and as hinted throughout the film, they are immortal beings who have resolved the issue of decay by continually absorbing other properties via the prism (like how the water in the glass behaves at the end). They embrace only when they assure the other that they are not themselves.

Bingo. I'm leaning towards real Lena being the one that returned, but she was profoundly affected by her time inside.

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The alien absorbs the tendency to self-destruction of the human DNA

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I like this more than the Ventress' cancer cell theory.


Nice breakdown

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Anya had the tattoo, not Lena.

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Both of them did.

She didn't have it in the flashbacks nor most of the time in the Shimmer. I'm not exactly sure when she "acquired" it, but I think it was when she approached the Lighthouse.