Discuss Annihilation
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An attempt to understand this movie
posted by The_FoxcatcherSTAFFMOD on March 16, 2018 at 5:08 AM
First lets go by Rules the movie established so we don't contradict them:
- After entering the Shimmer, the human team experiences black out and no one would remember how they set up their camp and spent their first four days.
- Inside the Shimmer, Compasses doesn't work. Radio signals doesn't work.
- The Shimmer causes random mutations in animals & humans already living inside it and also cause different mutated species of flowers to grow on a same tree/plant.
- Some human can get snake like organism swirling in his/her abdomen. (Were they mutated intestines or mutated intestinal worms or hybrid; god knows!)
- Plants grows in human shapes & mutated bear can mimic it's victim's voice.
- Mutated humans can also turn into a hybrid tree
- The central force (at the lighthouse) can consume a human and turn into a Shape Changing blob.
- The Blob can suck blood droplets of a human and can turn into its duplicate. The duplicate then learns/tries to mimic the original
- A Duplicate outside the Shimmer falls sick and face multiple organ failure.
- A Duplicate can also find specific person (of the Original's interest) which it might be looking for.
- If the duplicate/blob/central force gets exploded/catches fire, it destroys the whole 'system' (Shimmer) and its products (crystal trees)
- If the Shimmer is destroyed, the sick Duplicate gets cured.
We learn from the character of Lena, that even the extra terrestiral or the Shimmer probably doesn't know what it was doing. It could be that the extra terrestrial object which crash landed on Earth simply infected the land and everything inside the infected zone happened for no particular reason; was just a random pheonomena, just an involunatry happenstance, with random influence on life & environment in the area, based on its capacity to act as a biological prism. So the effects it had on the infected land are pretty pointless and the movie is just a Horror genre story about an encounter to the unknown (which we shall never know) and survival.
OR
It could be possible that there's a definite back story of the Extra terrestrial.
I theorize that Leena at the end was the Duplicate (Alien) and not the real Leena. The film is told from first person narrative of both Lena & its Duplicate (need to watch the movie once again and confirm). When the blood sample is taken by the blob, it creates a clone and the clone thrives to become an exact doppleganger of the human. First getting the shape right, then motion, then the aesthetics, organs, memories, voices. Once outside the Shimmer, the duplicate still tries to get a grip of itself. The true Aliens could be of some unimaginable form, may be originally living in some multi space-time universe. Getting transformed into to a totally different organism needs time to get adapted. They are experiencing their original's conscious & memories and it takes time to adapt and getting a grip and hence the confused state of Kane.
Its also possible that there never was a blackout. The doppleganger Leena wasn't efficient yet, enough to retrieve all memories from the brain. So may be she narrated a wrong story that they have no memories of their 4 days camping. The Alien/s were trying to understand the enviroment & life on Earth and subsequently adapt. In its attempt to transform into humans, it tried to create human shape from plants; just their way of checking if that works. Later they tried to mimic voices. So they mutated the bear into mimicing human voice. Finally, they realised they need memories because every human has a unique identity. So they need to clone a Human person, for which they'd require blood sample & one Human body matter (buliding blocks which makes up the human body). For Doppleganger Leena, they used the Body of Ventress and DNA of Leena to construct Leena's Clone.
The original mechanism of their habitat acts as a biological prism and for them, mutation is a continuous life process. On Earth, a life form can't continuously mutate. Hence, the Doppleganger Kane got sick. Once the Shimmer was destroyed the mechanism and its effect got destroyed and Kane became normal. If Leena at the end was Doppleganger Leena, then by the time she came out, the Shimmer was already destroyed and she never went sick. The only thing remained for both Doppleganger Kane & Leena was to get a grip on themselves which they intend to do so and both hugged.
What do you think ?
Reply by HikariWS
on December 6, 2023 at 9:36 PM
I'll write what I think before reading the posts.
It was clearly an alien life being. It wasn't good nor bad. It was interacting with life forms on Earth, changing and mixing individuals, a bit like an alien scientist that first finds earthling life, it's very skilled to the point of making such changes and mixes, but having earthling life completely new and unknown for it. And it's also very different from any kind of life here.
As it was mixing individuals, it was also incorporating in itself what it was finding. Some humans were trying to destroy it, and for those it reflected that. But some humans had other wills and reacted differently. That woman who turned into plant is an example, and Dr Ventress who wanted to learn what it was and merged with it.
So, it was reflecting/mirroring what interacted with it. When Lena attacked it, it attacked her back.
Parallel to that, as more humans went there and more aching to destroy it, it learned about it and researched means to protect itself and retaliate, maybe not even understanding these principles deeply. So it expanded its area of effect to make harder for ppl to get there, while it was researching and learning.
It then was able to replicate Kane, and not explaining it went to Lena who he loved. It was able to talk but barely talked, and for some reason got sick. With Lena it finally was able to replicate an almost perfect human. Everything it told was from her memory, except the ending. As it did to Kane making him explode himself, it also killed Lena.
My guess is that by learning complex human thoughts it understood humans wanted to kill it and considered that the best way of action was to fake its death. So it destroyed the whole place, but as a scientist said, when they got there they only found ashes and found no alien and presumed it had died. But it was in fact faking Lena, waiting for a chance to escape.
The ending was very bad, because the plot is very abstract, so I don't see it a fit plot for us to guess. The alien could do anything, as fleeing Earth, walking among humans as a human, replicate human by human until it controls whole mankind, or restart its expansion now with a better start.