If Natalie Portman's heroine in the new film of Alex Garland was not a soldier and a biologist, she should have become a film theorist. At least, her observations about flora and fauna are perfectly applicable to modern speculative cinematography.

Passing through the anomalous veil of "twinkling" in "Zone X" with deeply personal goals, the recruits of the organization "Southern limit" are met by unfamiliar forms of life. (At first, however, these forms look like an exhibition of the achievements of wedding florists and installations of colored montage foam, but believe me: more - more. ) "Look at these flowers. You can not tell from them that they are the same species, but, nevertheless, they grow on one branch, as if they are closed in a constant cycle of mutations, "says Lina (Portman). "Is it a pathology?" - her colleague asked on the expedition. "If you saw something like this in a person, you would not ask," the third.

Thanks to "Annihilation" we saw such a mutation - only on the example of the film. On one branch flowers blossom "Alien", "Arrival", "Event Horizon" and "Silent Hill". Or, if you like, "Picnic on the Roadside" and "Picnic at the Hanging Rock". Who will turn his tongue into a pathology?.

But if the form of "Annihilation" puzzles us with the question of where the boundary between eclecticism and genre confusion is, the plot of the film throws an even more fundamental problem: is there any border between "norm" and "pathology" beyond our anthropocentric perspective? Fortunately, in the coordinates of the film this global question sounds rather small. Why "fortunately"? Well, every home-grown critic has a moment when, in order to illustrate what has been said about a single work, one has to completely retell the other. Here comes my turn.

The Yugoslav postmodernist Danilo Kish has a story entitled "Encyclopedia of the Dead". The title "Encyclopedia" in it is a fictional collection of life stories of ordinary people, stored in the Royal Library of Sweden. The narrator comes to the library to find an article about his father D. , recently died of sarcoma. She reads his remarkably detailed biography and redraws from the article a floral pattern, which, according to Encyclopedia, was the main motif of his father's drawings. At the end of the story, the heroine learns that the outlines of the flower coincide with a picture of the tumor that killed D. , and that painting and the deadly disease in his life developed in parallel.

Why did I retell this? To the fact that no one would have interpreted the story of Kish as a fantastic vignette about the hidden beauty of pathologies. The fact that he belongs to the pen of one of the greatest masters of European literature of the twentieth century will not give us a fantasy image of the library and an outlandish ending to overlook the motives of national identity, family drama and historical upheavals.

And the two-hour "Annihilation", though the producers and branded it as "too complex a film," is still a product of entertaining cinematography. And what's worse is a very beautiful film. For this iridescent-flickering CGI-beauty it is very easy to catch and reduce the whole kaleidoscope of "Annihilation" themes to a set of philosophical platitudes. Like, mutations, decay and death can be a wonderful sight from some "cosmic" point of view. Or, they say, we are all part of the universal organism, so that no one's death or even the extinction of a whole species is tragedy, and on the other hand, every death is a tragedy, because "there is no man who is like an island, blah blah blah ".

But what's amazing is that the film did not get caught up in this scholasticism, or in an empty admiration of the paradise landscapes - although he had all the chances.

And this despite the fact that "Annihilation" is based on a very specific novel from the cohort of "conditionally unshielded". The first volume of Southern Reach Trilogy by writer Jeff Vandermeer is not a "scientific" or even a "metaphysical" fantasy. Vandermeer is associated with the current "new weird": his representatives bring to science fiction elements of absurdism, but at the same time they are fascinated by purely physiological aspects of wildlife. "New Wyrd" - these are the octopuses of Chiina Mieville, many-faced insects, fractals under a microscope and mutations.

But specifically the novel "Annihilation" - is more so-called "linguistic fiction"; A text that is enchanted by the possibilities and limits of the language no less than the crossing of people with trees. The framework plot of the novel is the same as in the film: the heroine biologist is sent to the "Zone X", from where her husband recently returned, fatally irradiated, and maybe not irradiated, and maybe not her husband. But it does not just enter the alien "zone"; it goes beyond familiar limits - terrestrial biology, human language, a network of its attachments, resentments and regrets. So, in one episode of the novel, the heroine descends into the "underground tower", on the walls of which reads vegetable (!) Letters, reminiscent of how the "Necronomicon" was written by a Catholic theologian.

From such a plot there would not be a movie, a maximum - a video installation. And that's where Garland's talent as a writer came in.. He did not just give the characters to Vandermeer - Biologist, Topographer, and so on - names. He made from a text that captures his impersonality (not to be confused with facelessness) a film that captures precisely his humanity.

In the end, what is more terrible for a person - to fly to a new planet and meet there monstrous xenomorfs, or fly to a new planet and meet there an exact copy of his house?.

Or so: what is worse for a person - the collapse of the family or the collapse of all its basic ideas about physics and biology? "Sho then x * yna, sho it x * ynya" - answers Alex Garland, but answers not in the forehead, but with the help of kinoshno esoteric receivers. That will show a glass of water, the condensate on which closes, like two hands. That will remove the naked back of Natalie Portman, so much so that you shake from the next visual associations with Strangers. When in the next frame it turns out that the heroine is still terrestrial - so much that she is capable of betraying the love of her life (Oscar Isaac) - this also beats her nerves: not with "cosmic horror" but with petty petty-bourgeois shock, but in that all the charm. Garland did not choose between physics and metaphysics, human and superhuman. Let it be both, and this. And the wave, and the corpuscle.

Blockbuster does not eclipse arthausal meditation, and vice versa. In the 15-minute stage before the finale, Lina meets the Other - an eerie cosmic resinous scarecrow that tries to mimic her, and, apparently, is her biological counterpart. "So, it was still an alien?" - asks the scientist in quarantine: how fundamental and at the same time banal this question should appear to the gaping viewer - he, in contrast to the questioner, saw the whole process of transformation. If "Annihilation" was a weaker film, this psychedelic scene would draw attention from some conceptual gaps.

But the fact of the matter is that the film stands firmly on its own feet (or whatever is in it) and does not need props; Special effects and narrative live in symbiosis. Such a balance is what most modern tapes lack, which at least the little finger (or whatever they have) are trying to touch upon philosophical and religious themes. Describing the failure of "Lovely Bones," critic Mark Fisher once sarcastically remarked that the film "was aiming at a fantasy and impossible sphere, but instead of lyrically-onyric became CGI-zadrotsky". Obviously, this is a problem not only the "Lovely Bones". Garland, again, did not choose between the two poles.

This is most obvious in the most seemingly uninteresting and typical for a fantastic thriller scene. One of the participants of the expedition binds the rest, including Portman's heroine, to the chairs, and pronounces a hysterical-accusatory monologue: among us, they say, a rat was crooned. How can I not remember the scene from John Carpenter's "Something" in which the character of Kurt Russell tries to calculate the "creature" by burning blood samples of his colleagues? (True, unlike him, the heroine of Gina Rodriguez realizes that everything has already turned into a "creature", including herself. ) At this point, our heroines visit a monster: a bear-like creature that absorbed a part of the personality of a previously killed member of the expedition (Cass Shepard).

In fact, this is the only full-fledged monster of the film: something fanged, slobbering, frightening (and not just "strange") and definitely deadly. But even at that moment there is no gap between the colorful Hollywood horror and the ideas that made the film stigmatized as a "high-brow". We, of course, are used to the fact that behind any, even the most overpowering Hollywood monster, there is something more than just a monster, whether it's a psychoanalytical or class interpretation (yeah, vampires here - rotting aristocracy, zombies working class, demons - the bourgeoisie ...) But the "Annihilation", damn, shows the man-bear-boar and makes you remember "About the resurrection of the flesh" Tertullian!.

Of course, mutant films with similar scope of ideas were filmed earlier, except that with more modest budgets. Looking at "Annihilation," it's hard not to remember the "Ninth Configuration" - a psychological drama, shot by William Peter Blattie on his own novel. The point, of course, is not that the protagonist-soldier both there and there bears the name Kane (the original name of the novel Blatty - Twinkle, Twinkle, "Killer" Kane). The fact is that both films in folds of multi-layered fiction disguised very simple and powerful stories about the atonement of guilt - although not prone to pathos rhetoric, the heroine Portman calls it simply "a duty".

Blatty was more than a mediocre director, and in 1980 - a stone age in terms of computer graphics. Fortunately, Garland has at his disposal both talent and technology. He can both smart and beautiful. He has a calculating head on his shoulders, and the hot heart of the visionary. Hollywood anomaly, and only. (Wave, corpuscle ...) Dualism "Annihilation," which does not throw its heroes and spectators one on one with the indifference of the cosmos - the best that is in the film.

After it, I want to not only refresh the school curriculum, as it happened with fantastic masterpieces of past years like Interstellar (although the author of the midnight review is stuck in articles on HeLa cells, which is concealed. ) After that, you want to go and embrace your significant other - but not, as God forgive, the "dear little man," but as an incredible mystery, another anomaly; the essence of one biological species with which you are so similar and unlike.

Source: Flashforward Magazine Join the TSN group. Blogs on facebook and follow the updates of the section!.