ANNIHILATION: The Five Stages of Invasion
NETFLIX/PARAMOUNTIn Alex Garland’s 2018 science-fiction film ‘Annihilation’, the mise-en-scéne is representative of the ongoing conflict, and eventual invasion, of humanity by the extra-terrestrial. In order to comprehend this, the viewer must first accept the theory that by the film’s conclusion its protagonist, Lena, has become assimilated by the alien race. The world of ‘Annihilation’ is, as Paolo Bertetti describes, a ‘uchronia’, a version of the world ‘based on a “what if” clause’, in this case being the presence of Area X. The film begins as a science-fiction mystery intent on investigating this focal environment, eventually morphing into an invasion film. Throughout its runtime, the mise-en-scéne visually implies this intended invasion before the audience is aware of it. As the film nears its close, the mise-en-scéne gradually adopts five central concepts to replicate this alien takeover: disconnect, transition, assimilation, annihilation, and eventually, rebirth. In this essay, I hope to explore how these concepts are translated by the mise-en-scéne to imply the progressive invasion that becomes the focal point of the narrative.
The first stage of this invasion is the disconnect of human characters from society, removing what become vessels for these aliens from safety. This is first visible near the beginning, when Lena rejects her co-worker, Daniel, which is then bookended by the arrival of her supposedly deceased husband, Kane. Here, from their respective characterisation, we see Lena as fully human, a character at the start of her journey, and Kane, who appears similar but behaviourally unusual, a character nearing the end of the same journey. Eco writes that ‘science-fiction always takes the form of an anticipation and anticipation always takes the form of a conjecture formulated from existing tendencies. From this, we can see that through each actor’s characterisation, we can anticipate a similar outcome to Kane for Lena. A second example of human disconnect appears when the team encounter a soldier in Area X, with their head separated from their torso by the effect of the Shimmer. This is a literal display of the alien method of invasion, separating mind from body, as is visible at the end of the film when Lena’s body only serves as a vessel for the alien that has assimilated her. The most important example of disconnect occurs when Anya ties the others to chairs, eventually resulting in her death, Ventress’ departure, and Josie’s abandonment of the mission. Garland uses CGI to show an unexplained movement under Anya’s hand that justifies her breakdown. Bertetti claims science-fiction ‘should provide a larger number of details in order to establish the new world logic and how it differs from the Actual World’, but the mise-en-scéne intentionally does not. It simply shows the effect of this extra-terrestrial intervention. Neither the audience, nor the characters understand what is happening to Anya, explaining her subsequent actions that help the alien dominate the group through their disconnection. Disconnecting humanity proves to be the insertion point from which the extra-terrestrial can commence the eventual invasion.
The second stage, transition, is the breakdown of the characters from wholly human into something new. There is a recurring lighting motif present throughout where Lena’s face is half-obscured by darkness, a visual representation of her duality between human and alien. This is developed by her conversation with Kane at the start of the film. Kane, who has already been assimilated, wears a black costume, whilst Lena wears grey. At this point in the film, white can be associated with purity and innocence, with grey as the mid-point between white and black. The costuming shows Lena to be in a transitional period between purity and evil. Bertetti writes that ‘the Fictional World is structurally different from the beginning… this difference is not immediately clear to the viewer or reader due to an information delay and a strategy of gradual revelation of novum’. When the film begins, the world of ‘Annihilation’ is in a transitional period, with Kane already assimilated. His arrival sets in motion Lena’s expedition, thus allowing the viewer to progressively discover the cause of this transition. Lighting is used once more to highlight this transition. When Lena wakes up in her home, the filmmakers use neutral white lighting to represent the human, gaining domestic connotations, which is then contrasted by Lena awakening in Area X, bathed in cold blue lighting, representing the alien and discomfort. At the end of the film, when Lena and Kane reunite, both having been assimilated, they are observed first through clear plastic with white lighting, then blue plastic. The shot transitions from the human to the alien through the lighting and colour it has trained the viewer to associate with the human and the alien. In one shot, Lena has transitioned. When describing Neill Blomkamp’s 2009 film ‘District 9’, Shohini Chaudhuri writes ‘in the early part of the film, the aliens are seen entirely through the filter of the host society, including the media and academic experts; its latter part, however, increasingly focuses on the aliens’ own perspective, the pivot being Wickus’ transformation’. The case is almost identical in ‘Annihilation’, the filmmaker transitions from the human perspective to the alien perspective subconsciously, only using mise-en-scéne to suggest so.
The third stage of this invasion is assimilation, the gradual takeover of humans by the alien. The most important translation of this to the audience takes place, again, when Kane returns home at the start of the film. Kane and Lena hold hands, their physical connection obscured by a glass of water centre frame with similar visual properties to the Shimmer. An extra-terrestrial presence is preventing the audience from observing genuine human interaction, because it isn’t genuine, instead an interaction between human and alien. The water glass motif appears again at the end, centrally framed as two reams of water around the glass meet to make one, proving Lena’s assimilation by the alien. This same method recurs when Lena visits a hospitalised Kane near Area X, with the shot being from the outside of the Shimmer-esque plastic wall containing Kane to represent its complete control over him. Geoff Ryman’s observation of the treatment of minorities in science-fiction media is comparable to the nullified personalities of those who’ve been assimilated in ‘Annihilation’. He writes ‘it appears that they have no cultural differences or political interests of their own that separate them from the mainstream. They have been assimilated’ The major indicator of alien assimilation in humans is through the eyes, with close-ups of both Lena and Kane’s irises shimmering and changing colour closing the film. Eyes are commonly referred to as windows to the soul. Spirituality is an inherently human concept, which now proves to the audience that their main characters are no longer human. Mullen perhaps explains this assimilation best, claiming ‘we are becoming “desubjectified” reduced to mere life’.
The titular stage, annihilation, is concerned with the eradication of what is natural by the alien. This is suggested by the lighting throughout the film. It is flared and unnatural, with prism-like colours, thus associating the mundane with the alien and establishing a regularity to the extra-terrestrial. This is furthered by the domination of both natural and synthetic constructs by alien vegetation. Ryman claims that ‘we dream of having the chance to remake things in our own image’, which proves to be exactly what the alien in ‘Annihilation’ is doing, taking what previously existed, natural or not, and altering it. He continues by saying ‘this dream can sometimes involve terracide’, however, this is only terracide from the human perspective. Thus, the mise-en-scéne here shows the alien presence annihilating what humanity perceives as normal and replacing it with what the extra-terrestrial would perceive as regular. The final humanoid form of the alien furthers this process of annihilation, not simply content to alter the environment, but themselves. In the lighthouse, the alien first tries to copy Lena’s movements in a child-like way, learning from the dominant race on the planet, becoming more and more aggressive before eventually, supposedly, destroying her. Trinh writes that ‘immigrants and refugees are encouraged to ‘be like us’, but never to be us’. The alien’s behaviour and movement show an adaptation, before becoming aware of its dominance over Lena and annihilating her. It tries to replicate her before noticing her flaws and overpowering her. It tries to be like us.
Rebirth is the final stage of this invasion, and essentially involves the progressive expansion of alien presence on the planet. From the very beginning of the film, this is evident. In the first shot of Lena, post-assimilation, a hard-key light illuminates half of her face, once again emblematic of her duality, physically human, but internally alien. She wears plain scrubs, with the white now representing rebirth into her alien form, exaggerated by the medical association scrubs have. This ensemble, therefore, likely gravitates toward a purification, not only of Lena, but with this rebirth, the purification of humanity as a whole and the suggestion that the invasion is underway. The aforementioned annihilation has resulted in the creation of a purer being. Lena is the same white colour as the lighthouse, the place of her rebirth, as the white phosphorous grenade that initiated Kane’s rebirth, and its burning similar to the alien’s destruction of the lighthouse, being associated with purification or cremation. Chaudhuri continues to say that ‘it is not the fearful whose space shrinks but those marked as objects of fear, who are subject to bodily containment and detention, including those who literally arrive in containers.’ The rebirth of these characters and the mise-en-scéne used to portray them is a triumphant one, reassuring us that the audience perspective has indeed transitioned from the human to the alien. The aliens are no longer objects of fear, as we are watching from their perspective. Humanity has become the object of fear, and their space is doomed to shrink.
In the source novel, author Jeff VanderMeer writes ‘These things are real and not real. They exist and do not exist. I remake them in my mind with every thought, every remembered detail, and each time they are slightly different.’. This encapsulates the unpredictable and infeasible nature of Area X and the gradual invasion from a human perspective. The environmental and human changes occurring are only inferred toward through the mise-en-scéne, without any verbal explanation from the characters because, like the audience, they’re similarly unaware about what is going on. Film is a visual medium and Garland uses it to explain what the characters cannot. ‘What is there to see in the image?’ a secret invasion from the inside out.
