That’s why when Lomax ( Benedict Wong), the scientist debriefing Lena, says, “So it was alien.” The line lands with such a thud. However, it’s also worth noting that the most common form of cancer is breast cancer, which largely affects women. From a plot perspective, this is explained by pointing out that previous teams were men, and this could change the results of the expedition. For example, the expedition team is all women.

Life grows and mutates, and sometimes you might see something beautiful like the white, skeletal deer with branches for antlers, and sometimes you get ScreamBear, the Bear Made of Screams.Īlthough Garland loosely adapted Jeff VanderMeer’s novel of the same name, certain details bolster the cancer metaphor. Garland wisely abstains from presenting everything as simply gross or beautiful. Annihilation remains consistent, constantly showing mutations, but mutations as they would occur on a body. It’s not like The Cloverfield Paradox, where anything can happen and nothing is explained so one dude is filled with worms and another dude has a severed arm that offers hints when you’re stuck. Minds, bodies-everything gets screwed up because that’s what cancer does to a healthy body.īut Garland presents this in a very specific way. Everything gets messed up because of mutations, and as Radek later explains to the group, they’re basically inside of a prism, so everything is refracting. Garland is basically taking a biological phenomenon and staging something similar to Fantastic Voyage, except instead of the scientists shrinking down to go inside someone’s body, the body they’re investigating is the Earth. Once Lena and the team are inside the Shimmer, they start noticing mutations, and those mutations represent cancer (the tumor at the heart of the Shimmer) affecting other cells. It’s not that cancer is inexplicable, but rather our understanding of it is still evolving. Yes, we can talk about risk factors, but there are perfectly healthy people who still get cancer. Everything is normal, and then it’s not, and in its place is something that’s mutating and, like The Shimmer, expanding. The unexplained phenomenon makes a good stand-in for how cancer strikes. We then cut back three years earlier when a mysterious something struck a lighthouse in the Southern Reach and that thing started expanding. She talks about cell division, particularly how cells rapidly divide and mutate. We immediately settle right into the movie's core metaphor right from Lena’s first lecture at Johns Hopkins.

Annihilation vandermeer