Reviews

Lena is a biology professor, ex-soldier, and wife of Kane, a soldier, who is regularly away from home on secret missions. She cheats on him; he finds out, and volunteers for a mission that no one has ever returned from. He enters the Shimmer - a weird alien area, much like the Zone in Tarkovsky's Stalker. He returns after a year, but something is not right, so Lena also volunteers, and enters the Shimmer with a five-member all girl team.

Annihilation is a mind bending experience. If you get the vibe, you will probably want to watch it one more time. But you may end up hating it, because it is not the kind of story you typically expect from a sci-fi. There is a mysterious, alien area in the movie, depicted brilliantly using great pictures and CGI, but the story is centred on a journey inside our minds (again, just in case of the Stalker). The Shimmer, as it is explained in the movie, is a bit like a tumour: it reshuffles/mixes the structure of everything - crystals, genes, and even mental processes - and so speeds up change enormously. Why would one want to enter such a dangerous zone? Because it is part of our nature, Ventress, a psychologist explains. Most people have self-destructive tendencies: if something is fine with our lives, we cannot be happy with it, we want to change it.

But while we can never be fully satisfied with what we have, and regularly look for something new - a change, we are also frightened of change. Potentially, because we feel that if we change, we are no longer ourselves. As Ventress puts it at the end of the movie, "Our bodies and our minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts until... not one part remains - annihilation". So that would be my read on the movie: our constant thirst for, and fear of change, and the tension this constant struggle creates in our minds.

In the very last scene the couple meet again. "Are you Kane?" she asks; "I don't think so" he answers. "Are you Lena?" is the final line in the movie. She is probably not. They have changed, and this might help them to move on. Tarkovsky's Stalker is about ultimately everything staying as it was before, why Garland's Annihilation is about ultimate change. I am not sure which vision is actually closer to reality.

I was worried about season 3, because sooner or later all TV shows get to the point where the story becomes completely irrelevant, and the only reason the creators keep pumping out new episodes is the fact that they can still make money with it. At the end of season 2 I felt that Banshee got to that point. It was not terribly difficult to accept that Hood first stayed in Banshee because he was mad and frustrated, and then because he wanted to protect Carrie from her father, but once Rabbit was dead, the only logical move would have been to leave town – which would have meant the end of the show as well.

But Hood stayed. The writers made Carrie not to reveal Hood's true identity, so he could stay as a sheriff. This explanation is not the worst that you could think of, even though it meant the end of Carrie's marriage and the falling apart of her family – the two things that were the most important for her, as we were constantly reminded in the first two seasons. Either way, I can accept this solution, and I guess the writers will have nine more episodes to make her decision more credible. That's why I think the show is still on track.

And because crazy things still keep happening in Banshee. Right in the first scene we see the whole sheriff department executing a suspect in the middle of the night. Two super villains are brought back, and we learn that there is a military base as well near the town. The only thing Banshee is missing is a top secret underground lab where they experiment of a virus that later on zombifies 99% of humanity. I'm really curious how hot a zombie Rebecca would look, locked away in Proctor's cellar, fed daily with some fresh Native American flesh.