For our annual summer countdown, we are looking at our favorite 25 movies that were not huge hits during their initial release, but mean a lot to us. Check out last year’s Summer of Stars countdown or the year before when we did blockbusters! Find the rest of the Flop and Fizzle series here!

by Tessa Swehla, Staff Writer

In Octavia E. Butler’s seminal and eerily prophetic novel Parable of the Sower (1993), the protagonist Lauren Olamina concludes that “Change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe.” It is usually the goal of sci-fi writers and filmmakers to write about change, imagining “what-if” scenarios about changes in biology, ecology, technology, society, culture, and science. Often these what-if scenarios function as explorations of current anxieties and social issues–what if we had the technology to feed everyone, what if cis-men could become pregnant, and what if aliens try to colonize Earth. Change in these stories is a plot point or a call to action, necessary for the story’s existence and impact on its audience. However, there are the rare sci-fi writers like Butler and Jeff VanderMeer who are more interested in the unknown qualities of change. What if we were confronted with a change that defied all of our ability to comprehend it?

As one such sci-fi creator fascinated by unimaginable changes, it was a natural step in Alex Garland’s career to write and direct an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel Annihilation, the first book in the then unpublished Southern Reach trilogy. The film Annihilation (2018) follows the journey of biologist and former soldier Lena (Natalie Portman) as she explores a landscape of terrifying and beautiful changes that reflect the ones literally and metaphorically occurring inside her. When Lena’s husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) suddenly returns after being reported KIA for a year, it seems like a miracle despite his strange behavior and illness. The couple is quickly imprisoned by a government organization, and Lena learns what happened to her husband: he was sent on a top secret expedition into an expanding zone called the Shimmer that appeared three years prior due to a mysterious meteor strike. Kane is the only person to ever return from the Shimmer, but he is clearly dying. Lena volunteers to go with the next expedition, hoping to find answers, but quickly realizes that the Shimmer challenges every scientific and existential belief that she has.

Lena’s expedition team is a powerhouse of brilliant but troubled women: project psychologist and team leader Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), physicist Josie (Tessa Thompson), geomorphologist Cassie (Tuva Novotny), and paramedic and all-around muscle Anya (Gina Rodriguez). Each of them have their own traumas, secrets and reasons for wanting to volunteer for what is essentially a one-way mission. As they move through the Shimmer, it quickly becomes apparent that the plant and animal life is going through massive evolutionary upheavals. These changes often involve the mixing of distinct species and even different kingdoms in ways that are scientifically impossible. A giant alligator with layers of shark teeth. A single plant producing different species of flowers. A pair of white deer with tree branch antlers. Plants growing in the shape of humans. Josie and Lena theorize that the Shimmer acts as a prism for DNA, mutating, doubling, corrupting and duplicating forms. These biological changes begin to happen to the team as well, causing them to begin to question their own reality. The visuals are gorgeous yet eerie and sometimes upsetting. Garland knows how to play to a feeling of wrongness, a suspicion that we are watching a plan unfold that is just out of our reach of understanding.

Why was this film a flop? One reason might be that this kind of heady sci-fi film might be out of fashion for the general public, drawing primarily Garland or VanderMeer fans. Another reason might be the inability of Paramount and Netflix to market the film properly. The advertising for this film relied heavily on the woman dominated cast to project an illusion of “girl power” over the film as well as playing up the horror elements over the philosophical ones. The film is only really interested in the horror that comes from the blurring of biological and existential boundaries, the failure to hold onto those things that the characters believe make them essentially human. Terrifying, definitely, but not something that is going to hold the attention of someone promised a lot of jump scares.

And yet the main reason, I believe, this film did not do well is because it is ultimately about cancer, just not in the way most filmgoers are used to. Usually when someone describes a film as a “cancer movie,” people imagine a very specific kind of narrative, usually involving a successful remission–as in the film 50/50 (2011)–or a doomed romance between two quirky teenagers–as in The Fault in Our Stars (2014). In all of these usual narratives, the relationship between cancer and humans exists within well-worn metaphors of warfare and battle (if you don’t believe me, think about how we talk about someone “fighting” cancer or cancer “invading” the body).

But in Annihilation, cancer is just another mutation, a lifeform on its own evolutionary journey. In the first scene, we see cells taken from a cancerous tumor dividing, doubling, and growing. The camera pulls back to reveal that this is a video shown by Lena to one of her biology classes. She claims that the cells were taken from “the cervix of a female, 30s,” and when asked what happened to the patient, she answers that the patient died. This is a not-so subtle reference to the HeLa cells: a cancerous strain commonly called immortal due to its ability to continue to divide and reproduce indefinitely (for more information about the fascinating and important history of these cells, I recommend you check out Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Lives of Henrietta Lacks or this article.) 

This is a clear example of a mutation, a change that allowed a lifeform, in this case cancer, to evolve and change into something new. This idea, that cancer is part of the evolutionary process, is echoed throughout the film: Lena calls some of the mutations in The Shimmer “malignant” and says that in a human they would be considered pathologies. In some ways, The Shimmer itself acts as a cancer, slowly changing and mutating the landscape to better suit its growth.  These ideas are not comfortable ones for many: they don’t fit into the narrative of cancer as a disease aligned with death. Here, cancer is aligned with life AND death, coexisting together to create changes. It erodes our notions of the immutable human body, of the rigid structures of us versus the other, of change as something in our control.

Lena and Kane’s fate in the end is purposely ambiguous and neutral: we don’t understand what has happened to them because they do not fully understand what has happened to themselves. What the film does tell us is that change is inevitable, and we may not be as in control as we think we are. To end with another quote from Butler: “All that you touch, You Change. All that you Change, Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.”