In 2014, Alex Garland surprised everyone with his directorial debut: Ex Machina. It was smart, intense, and exactly what the film fans was looking for at the time. So when Alex Garland’s next film, Annihilation, was announced, the scifi community was buzzing with excitement. The trailers looked intense and adult, Natalie Portman was making a return to a genre film after swearing off them due to her experience with Thor: The Dark World, everything about it had cinema geeks like me on the edge of our seat with anticipation.

Then the film was released, and it was just as good as we hoped it would be. It takes a familiar premise: a group of scientists investigate an anomaly, and subverts audience expectations with its cast of damaged and fully three-dimensional female leads acted to perfection and dark, extremely cinematic storytelling. The film is absolutely gorgeous with CGI that is beyond stunning (and just as importantly, necessary), and its direction and cinematography is so much to write home about. It is everything fans and critics loved about Ex Machina and then some without ever feeling derivative.
And yet, the film only grossed $11 million opening weekend off an estimated $40 million budget. Compare that to Black Panther’s $202 million gross its opening weekend and $143 million the same weekend as Annihilation. To be sure, no one was expecting Garland’s little scifi movie to make as much as Coogler’s, but certainly fans were hoping for more than this.

But if you’re a fan of films, the source of Annihilation’s problems will come as no surprise: the studio. Paramount had a rough year in 2017. The studio made 5% of the film industry’s total gross last year. They took a lot of big risks with films like Mother!, Suburbicon, Ghost in the Shell, and Downsizing, none of which paid off financially. Moreover, their big for-sure moneymakers like Transformers: The Last Knight, Daddy’s Home 2, Baywatch, and xXx: The Return of Xander Cage didn’t do nearly as well as the studio assumed.

So, Paramount had to make some changes this year, starting off early with The Cloverfield Paradox. The film was sold to Netflix in secret, who then turned it into an event by announcing during the Superbowl that the third Cloverfield film would be released in just a few hours. They did something similar with Annihilation, selling it directly to Netflix in every country besides the U.S., Canada, and China. In short, Paramount is hedging their bets on their riskier films; the ones that aren’t sure to gain a profit like a Transformers flick. Because of this, though, they massively cut the scifi masterpiece’s marketing budget to reduce costs, knowing that whatever it made in theatres was just icing on the cake, as they’d already made a profit selling the film to Netflix.

Garland was naturally furious. He told Metro, “We made it for the big-screen. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that you would just do differently [if it were made for streaming platforms]. You would literally shoot it differently, have a different process, if that’s what you were aiming for… It was done for money. It is Hollywood for f***’s sake. It’s always about money.”

So what can be done to save the trainwreck Paramount’s created? Go see Annihilation! It’s fantastic. Be grateful that something as out there as this film was made at all, and that you’re lucky enough to live in a country where you can see it on a big screen, how it was meant to be viewed. Send a message to Hollywood that films like this ARE financially viable, that there IS a market for them, and that audiences WILL go see a great film.

Annihilation and Demythologization by Jacob Maher I love adventure movies. A group of heroes go into an unknown land and seek to see what they can find. There’s often a quest, and the ultimate goal of the protagonist is to complete the quest. It’s simple and fun. We see this in Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park, and more recently, in Disney’s Moana. But there is a problem with adventure movies, as there is with all genres, which is that the genre’s cliches become predictable and an audience demands something more. That’s where Alex Garland and his science fiction masterpiece, Annihilation, enters the picture. The most basic synopsis of the film is that Lina (Natalie Portman) and four other scientists venture into a region called the “Shimmer” to investigate why no one has yet come back from their journeys into it. That is a classic set up to a familiar formula in the adventure genre.

However, Garland’s film mixes things up a bit by simply taking the tropes of the genre and making them darker and more adult. All five of our main characters are broken people dealing with hardship. (And all are women, which is notable because it’s rare to see a film in this genre that doesn’t have at least one strong male character playing a massive role). Many of the creatures and events in the Shimmer are made so dark and horrific that they make us realize how terrifying these stories actually are when we strip away the whimsy of it all. And the whole thing is a very mature metaphor for depression, something that would not be done in a film like Indiana Jones which has to appeal to kids. This style of storytelling, the reveal of a genre’s darkest elements other movies hide from the viewer, is something writer John Cawelti called “demythologization.” An obvious element of this can be found in one of the hallmarks of the adventure genre: discovering and vanquishing a foe. In Moana, for example, the title character and Maui have a run-in with a group of coconut-garbed pirate creatures called “Kakamora.” The scene lasts less than three minutes, and is included purely as a fun jolt of adrenaline.

Annihilation also has a run in with a fantastical element, a bear that has been genetically altered and is much more aggressive, amongst other, more horrifying changes I dare not spoil here. It attacks and carries one of the leads off into the woods, and is later revealed that it kills her. The bear attacks again later in one of the most horrifying scenes I’ve witnessed in a film ever. It has a similar setup to Moana’s Kakamora, but a completely different outcome that subverts audience expectations and reveals dark truths about genre and story. That’s what is so wonderful about Annihilation. Much like Chinatown did to the detective genre or Logan did to the superhero genre, so Garland’s film does to the adventure genre. Along with well-written characters, a beautiful setting, directing and cinematography that is nearly perfect, the way Annihilation’s story subverts audience expectations and keeps them on their toes through demythologization is what makes it such a joy to watch.

Editorial by Jacob Maher