I came back to your website to check on your thoughts on Annihilation, which I saw recently. (I had posted some comments about Coherence and it was the reason I’d found this website.) I believe we don’t see many movies as great as Annihilation these days, so I came here to check what people might think of it, their ideas, etc. I really liked your last theory on Annihilation: the self-destructive mentality of Lena. It seems very interesting, at least, to me. I liked the other theories, too.

I should also say that I had watched Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which was the reason that urged me to watch Annihilation. The core idea of both movies are similar, and I think the director, Alex Garland, is a fan of Tarkovsky.

I think the cancer analogy is the framework of everything in the movie :

cancer = something damages a cell and instead of performing the tasks it was designed to do it starts replicating like crazy (making something new) and given enough time it causes the death of everything around it which also causes itself to die. The cancerous cells cause self destruction = annihilation

infidelity = Lena commits adultery instead being true to her husband, Kane. Over time her adultery causes the destruction of the sincere bond between her and her husband. Their marriage is annihilated. Kane gives up on her and goes on a suicide mission. Lena’s infidelity was her self destruction on her own marriage = annihilation

alien = an alien life form lands on Earth and starts making something new out of what it finds on Earth. The alien life form’s activity grows geographically which causes Earthlings to feel threatened by it. So we keep sending in soldiers to find out how we can contain the alien’s activities, and on one of the missions a biologist, Lena, is able to destroy the alien with a phosphorous grenade. The alien’s attempt to make something new out of Kane is what drew Lena into Area X. The alien’s attempt to make something new out of Lena is what motivated Lena to kill the alien = annihilation

What will happen now that Lena and Kane have been created/changed by the alien? Since the alien’s activity seemed like the creation of random combinations I’m guessing Lena and Kane will create chaos on Earth and given enough time, total destruction just like someone randomly combining code in a computer program. Given enough time for random combination after random combination a computer running the screwed up program will go from chaos to annihilation. Earth is a robust system, but if the alien process can change all the water into something else, annihilation comes quickly.

i agree with everything you wrote. i especially like your “second wave” theory. i felt like what we were shown made it pretty clear that the biologist was the original person, but when her and her husband’s doppleganger’s eyes shimmered, it became clear that it didn’t matter. this is because the change was at a cellular level. in her husband’s case, he was completely replaced, but in her case, she was replaced from the inside out… or evolved… or something.

two interesting aspects of this movie were the lost time in the shimmer, and the untrustworthy storyteller dilemma. since the biologist is the only source of information as to wtf happened in the inside, we don’t know if anything she said was true. this gives ground for your second wave theory to work. i had a hard time accepting the idea that she was really a doppleganger and just lying about what happened, simply because it doesn’t explain why the lighthouse burned. except if your second wave theory is correct, then the shimmer could be burned down, and it would help the doppleganger biologist’s chances of survival afterwards.

the lost time is really quite interesting, and it’s barely explored in the story. however, it raises a lot of questions. at first, i thought a time dilation made sense, as it would give all of the genetic mutations time to occur… but had to quickly nix that because the time dilation was backwards. in other words, for that theory to work, being gone years in the shimmer should have only been seconds on the outside. instead, we are told that she was gone for four months, but only had rations for a couple weeks.

this is where it gets really interesting. pulling on that thread, we know that no one remembers the previous days after entering the shimmer, and yet as they go along, they do remember things from previous days. why would they recover their memory… is it because they are getting further away from the border… or is it because they’re all dopplegangers from the moment they get out of their tents? how many other dopplegangers replaced them and walked their path before the ones that we were shown?

maybe, just maybe, step 1 of the alien biological experiment was to replicate the highest lifeform on the planet perfectly. step 2, prove that they have completed the replication by creating such a being that was capable and driven to destroy the source, and step 3, go forth and multiply… eventually taking over the entire planet at a cellular level, and at the same time evolving itself by taking the best of what it absorbs. the prism would then shoot off to some other planet and start all over. i like how this ties in with the beginning of the movie. the biologist talks about everything coming from one cell, and dividing to eventually turn into everything that exists. this prism alien thing is kind of doing the opposite. it’s taking all the cell’s and mixing them up into one all-thing.

or maybe it’s all much more straightforward than that, and i’ve just watched/read too many mindjobs. but hey, the best part is how much stories like this make you think.

No, more likely, an error happened when miabergvall posted her comment? I’ve been getting lots of 500 server errors when people post comments lately. Trying to figure it out, but it has eluded me. As a rule, the only comments I ever delete are ones that are hateful towards other commenters. Just saying. I’ll ask miabergvall what we are missing and apologize for the server glitch.

Anyway, the last meaning is exactly the meaning I took, down to the copy self destructing. The affair was her self destructing a “happy marriage” and what she referenced when she told Kane “I know why you did this” and “I owe him”…

Little harsh on the random comment from the first commenter but otherwise appreciate the thoughts.

Wait wait wait Albert…
you just blew my mind. You thought that Lena and herself? (Lena and the Biologist? The two characters that struggled together, and then Lena handed the phosphorous grenade to? Those two?) You saw those two as Adam and Eve…?

Mind. Blown.