Paramount+ Is Streaming Natalie Portman's Must-Watch Sci-Fi Horror Movie

Alex Garland's "Annihilation," which is currently available to stream on Paramount+, is a heady film that is just as much about Freudian psychology as it is about fictional science. Its tone is bleak and downbeat, and all its characters seem infused with fear and insecurity. There is no fun or levity in "Annihilation." At best, there are a few pastoral moments of eerie beauty as its characters look over various nightmarish landscapes of biological mystery. The world, life, and evolution, "Annihilation" seems to say, are all a random smoothie of cells and emotions that are haphazardly remixed by nature. Humans are a weird fluke of organic chance, a species created by Darwin's roulette wheel. And at the center of it all is our inexplicable desire to destroy ourselves. The "Annihilation" of the title alludes to various levels of self-annihilation. Either we are literally infused with an impulse toward self-destruction or we are keen to destroy our own egos, our own sense of self, and fuse with a higher, godlike consciousness. 

Both things happen in Garland's movie, itself one of the best films of 2018. 

"Annihilation" was also technically a bomb, barely covering its budget at the box office. But it was never going to be a hit anyway, as it was simply too weird and ethereal to appeal to mainstream audiences. Horror fans gravitated to the film, though, keen to experience all its scenes of monsters and bodily mutation. One of the film's creatures — a bear that has a human skull for a head and screams like a person — belongs in the canon of great movie creatures. 

It's also one of the few sci-fi films to boast a predominantly all-women cast. Natalie Portman leads an ensemble consisting of Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, Tuna Novotny, and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

The premise of "Annihilation" is eerie and dreamlike. Several years prior to the start of the film, a meteor landed on a wildlife preserve in Florida, creating a mysterious, miles-wide bubble that cut it off from the rest of the world. A team of soldiers was sent into the bubble — called The Shimmer — to investigate, but they never emerged. Since then, the Shimmer has been, quite distressingly, expanding. A year after he went in, a soldier named Kane (Oscar Isaac) has somehow emerged from the Shimmer, only with no memory of what happened inside. 

The head of a new research expedition, Dr. Ventress (Leigh), calls upon a cellular biology professor named Lena (Portman) to assemble a team and enter the Shimmer to see if they can find any clues as to how it operates and what happened to the previous team. Lena also happens to be Kane's wife, so she has a personal stake in solving the mystery. 

The interior of the Shimmer is like a dream. Biological organisms seem to be growing and merging in ways that don't usually happen in nature. It's as if DNA strands are being shared throughout the natural world, causing trees to grow the wrong kind of fruit, animals to grow the wrong kind of body parts, and for plants to take on human characteristics. Naturally, the Shimmer is also affecting the scientists' brains, causing them to panic and lose touch with reality. We see early on in the film that the Shimmer can cause one's intestines to start crowing around inside one's body like snakes (thanks to a video made by Kane), so there is every reason to be distressed. And, again, there are bear monsters afoot.

The source of the Shimmer seems to be the St. Mark's Light, a lighthouse at the edge of the preserve. Through monsters and mayhem, Lena works her way there, knowing that she might be able to find the answers she's looking for. By the end of the film, though, there is an apocalyptic tone hanging over everything like a cloud of spores. Dr. Ventress and Lena have conversations about how humanity so often shows a propensity to destroy itself and work against its best interests. Lurking beneath those conversations is a Freudian notion involving the Death Drive. We are all fascinated by our own end and sometimes accelerate the process, instinctually, out of a distant sense of grim curiosity.

Not to give away the ending to "Annihilation" entirely, but the Shimmer eventually begins producing more and more accurate biological duplicates of the beings that it absorbs, meaning that at least one character ends up having to face off against an other-worldly doppelgänger. One gets the sense, though, that the alien doppelgänger is not a conscious being; rather, it's a mere cluster of evolutionarily swift cells. They can imitate Earth creatures and even copy them, but they have no will of their own. When a particular character faces a doppelgänger, she is very literally facing herself, as the doppelgänger can't do anything she won't.

Critics were mostly positive on "Annihilation," with many of them falling under the film's eerie spell. It's ethereal, heady, and cerebral, the way all great sci-fi ought to be. And, as mentioned, it's on Paramount+. If you want more, you should read the original book series that inspired the film. It was penned by author Jeff VanderMeer and includes the novels "Annihilation," "Authority," "Acceptance," and "Absolution."