Annihilation, by Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation is a very weird book, but it doesn’t start out that way. It starts out just everyday-weird, like a kind of scifi mystery leading you to mildly wonder what could be causing the unusual things that are happening? Is it alien? Human experimentation? Evolution gone awry? But instead of drawing you closer to an answer, it just exponentially ramps up the weirdness. This is what the graph of weirdness looks like as you read further along in the book:
Eventually you feel like you know less about what’s going on that you did when you started. I wasn’t worried, though, because I was going to see the movie which I figured would help. It didn’t. If anything, the movie was even weirder than the book. It also wasn’t so much based on the book as (very) loosely inspired by it. Again, it starts out promising, doing an interesting job of translating a very cerebral book into a very visual movie while managing to maintain some of the mood and suspense. But before long it, too, soon falls off the edge into crazy-land. The only clarifying the movie seems to do is to confirm that the weirdness is of alien origin. Don’t get me wrong, apart from one Revenant-channeling scene the movie wasn’t un-enjoyable, it was just … weird. Really freaking weird.
But I do have to give kudos to Alex Garland, the screenwriter/director. He manages to take random snippets from the book and create a whole new, equally but differently, strange movie. There are still the women scientists (5 instead of 4, and with names in the movie which they are not given in the book), there is still the village of people-shaped plants, there’s a lighthouse (which, in keeping with the oddities, is never actually ascended), and there are animal/human(?) hybrids. There’s also the creature which in the book is referred to as the Crawler and in the movie is … god only knows. Some kind of kaleidoscope, or a Mendlebrot set, that might also be a person? Or a copy of a person? Or maybe a refraction?
You get the idea. Or rather, you don’t get the idea even at all, which I think might be the point.
Rating: If you are a fan of scifi, then totally read it. There are two other books in the series which I plan to read, at the risk of becoming even more baffled, in the hopes of having even one thing explained.