How Annihilation changed Jeff VanderMeer’s weird novel into a new life-form

Warning: Major spoilers for both the film and book versions of Annihilation.

Alex Garland’s Annihilation, the mind-bending science fiction journey into the world of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach books, is an astounding film. It’s smart and daring and almost as satisfying to talk about as it is to experience firsthand. It’s even more astonishing considering its source, a seemingly unadaptable, utterly bizarre novel. But Garland found a way to make the film into its own creature. His version is simultaneously faithful in spirit and shockingly bold in its departures in plot and theme.

The film carries over the book’s core elements: a mysterious barrier, known as Area X by the shadowy government agency that studies it, appears around a slice of marshy coastline. Humanity — particularly a group of four female scientists — struggles existentially and physically to make sense of Area X’s fundamentally unknowable threat. But where VanderMeer’s novel is more concerned with the breakdowns the threat creates on a mental, physical, ecological, and sociological scale, Garland’s film takes a more personal tack. The director of Ex Machina, known for his thoughtful scripts and his ability to mix tension-filled horror with surreal thought experiments, touches more on themes of fluid self-identity and the destructive impulses of human consciousness. And he uses the inexplicable nature of an alien life-form to explore those themes in profound ways.

As a result, Garland’s creation is a staggering metafictional exercise on the nature of personhood and change. The film rearranges and mutates elements from the novel to create something new, much like how Natalie Portman’s character describes Area X’s overall effect. For that reason, it’s worth dissecting how the film changes the book’s themes and takeaways, and how Garland used his artistic liberty to craft an original story from a shared set of ingredients. Here are four key ways he departed from the book.

Photo: Paramount Pictures

1. The protagonist’s motive

The biologist known as Lena in the movie, played by Natalie Portman, has no name in VanderMeer’s book. None of the four participants on the Area X expedition (there are five in the movie) have names or concrete backgrounds, which ties into VanderMeer’s exploration of identity and its reconstruction inside the “pristine wilderness” of Area X, as his characters are fond of saying. This depersonalization makes it difficult for readers to care about the expedition members on an emotional level, but they aren’t primarily in the story for traditional world-building reasons.

VanderMeer uses the characters — specifically the biologist and her first-person narration — to satisfy his thematic points about Area X’s nature. Through the biologist’s prose, a cerebral mix of scientific observation and stream of consciousness used to underline her mutating mental state, VanderMeer tells the story of Area X. Her husband, so key in Garland’s film, isn’t important in the book outside his function as a plot device (at least not until much later in the trilogy). In the book, he dies of the undiagnosable blend of cancers he picks up during the expedition, and she hardly seems to mourn him. Nonetheless, readers have to assume she enters Area X because she’s innately curious about what caused his death.

Garland’s film takes an equally intellectual, sterile approach to characterization, treating the expedition participants as thematic tools much like VanderMeer does. Garland even goes out of his way in the first few minutes to make sure the audience knows none of them, except Portman’s character, clearly make it out alive, so viewers shouldn’t get too attached to them. However, Lena’s relationship to her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac), as he’s known in the movie, and the reasons for her choosing to enter Area X (which the movie calls “the Shimmer”) are central to the film and important to what Garland is trying to say.

In the movie, extensive flashbacks suggest that Lena and Kane’s relationship was in trouble long before he enters the Shimmer. He withholds information about his military-related excursions, and she, in turn, is having an affair when he’s away. Kane may have signed up for the mission because he felt his marriage falling apart. Still, Lena cannot rationalize why her husband entered the Shimmer, and why he chose not to tell her of the nature of the journey.

Lena tells this to psychologist and fellow expedition participant Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), suggesting that the trip into the Shimmer is a “suicide mission.” Ventress tells Lena that few people commit suicide, but that almost everyone “self-destructs.” That’s the thematic core of Garland’s take on VanderMeer’s book, which the director has described as more of a “subjective response” than a faithful adaptation. In a recent interview, Garland told The Verge that he wanted to tell a story about the way the literal, molecular process of self-destruction in organic life mirrors the psychological one in humans, in which we’re always rewriting our own personalities and resisting, or failing to resist, self-destructive choices.

By entering the Shimmer, which has swallowed up several previous expeditions without a trace, Lena appears to be choosing self-destruction. Ostensibly, she’s seeking answers, but she also appears unhappy with the pain she’s caused Kane and the weight of his fate. The idea that self-destruction is coded into humans on a biological level underpins Lena’s journey. It’s also that quality of humanity that Area X most threatens by robbing organic life of its mental and biological agency.

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures

2. The nature and source of Area X

The sense of mystery is what makes VanderMeer’s book (and much of his fiction) so tantalizing and awe-inspiring. The Southern Reach trilogy is set in an ambiguous near-future where the collapse of ecosystems, the tyranny of bureaucratic institutions, and the deterioration of the Earth is taken as a kind of inevitability, based on the course of current history. But VanderMeer never explains these elements or many other details surrounding Annihilation. The omissions are purposeful: his worlds feel familiar but unknowable in a borderline conspiratorial, almost post-apocalyptic way, much like how American society’s current dysfunctions would feel alien to generations past.

This has the effect of narrative devices like Area X seeming as befuddling to readers as it is to the Southern Reach organization, an agency that continuously sends people to meet grisly fates, with little to no data on what’s happening to them. In VanderMeer’s strange but recognizable future, even the government doesn’t have much agency or much clue as to what’s going on. (It is no wonder then that Annihilation’s sequel, focused on the dysfunctions of the Southern Reach, is called Authority.)

Garland takes a more conventional approach to the source of Area X, and how it operates. Garland’s Shimmer is an alien effect spreading from a meteor impact, but VanderMeer withholds that information until the third book in the series and explains it only through a character’s feverish vision. Garland doesn’t want the phenomenon dismissed as a dream or hallucination. Its alien nature is important to the meat of his story. He also invents a theory of how the Shimmer operates, as a prism that refracts DNA, blending and mutating every source of life within it. In the book, the reasons behind Area X’s effects are treated as another unknowable mystery. We’re not supposed to understand how it operates.

And that may be because one of VanderMeer’s central ideas in Annihilation — one explored at length in the comparable film Arrival, and many other science fiction classics — is that a first-contact event with alien life might not be recognizable in any rational way. We may not understand alien motives or even be able to communicate with creatures radically different from us. VanderMeer takes this idea to the extreme, suggesting that we may not, on an ontological level, even be able to comprehend an alien form, that it could be so different and vast as to warp our sense of reality and reason. His books even suggest that Area X contorts spacetime, transporting its inhabitants to an entirely different part of the universe, which would explain the time dilation people experience inside it.

Area X is designed to be strange, shocking, and horrific, because it’s simply too much for humans to perceive. As David Tompkins wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books back in 2014, it’s a kind of “hyperobject,” similar to a black hole, the Big Bang, or climate change — other systems so vast and complex that we can’t say we reliably or fully understand them.

Area X is so alien, humans inside it experience a kind of ego death. Explorers descend into madness, and only the biologist’s extraordinary self-determination allows her to find balance with the place. Garland incorporates this idea throughout, via Kane’s suicide and Anya’s assault on her teammates. But his focus is more on Lena and how her experience in the Shimmer speaks universally about human nature.

Photo: Paramount Pictures

3. The Crawler and the clones

While the plot of Garland’s Annihilation roughly tracks the first two-thirds of the book, he takes some bold liberties with the ending, particularly regarding the physical manifestation of the Shimmer’s “core.” VanderMeer sends his expedition members down an underground tunnel, which the biologist thinks is actually a tower, representing one of the many ways VanderMeer toys with the idea that Area X can push the limits of even the human brain’s ability to draw meaning from language. Within the tower, they find the Crawler, the closest thing Annihilation has to an antagonist. This is the foe the biologist feels she’s destined to confront.

The Crawler is best described as a mutated human, a blend of whatever constructed and comprises Area X, and the first person it “infected.” Its origin is explained in later books, but the Crawler functions as a physical manifestation of Area X. The Crawler is the most Lovecraftian element in VanderMeer’s book, especially when it’s writing biblical-sounding nonsense on the tower walls in a kind of organic fungi ink. Its words, which literally came to VanderMeer in a dream, don’t seem to mean anything. They’re an element of horror and weirdness.

Later, the Crawler and the biologist come into contact, a decision the biologist makes as a defiant act of radical free will in the face of Area X’s soul-crushing subjugation. As a result, Area X creates a clone of the biologist and sends it to the outside world. This wholly new, unique organism has its own identity, and it plays a major role in the later books. The original biologist stays behind, knowing the clone of her husband died outside Area X, and the original may still be inside, transformed into something new, but alive. The function of the cloning is never clear, but VanderMeer suggests the clones act a bit like sleeper agents to aid the expansion of Area X.

Garland changes key aspects of this part of the book, which results in one of the trippiest, most mesmerizing stretches of filmmaking since the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dr. Ventress apparently becomes, in her own way, a version of the Crawler: Lena finds her inside the tunnel in the base of the lighthouse, and sees her break apart and transform into a pulsating, textured flower that produces a clone of Lena. VanderMeer confirmed in an email to The Verge that the being was Garland’s personal take on the Crawler, a kind of “skin” of the creature, if you will, while other elements like the crystal trees and the texture of the lighthouse he says feel inspired by his text descriptions of the Crawler from the book. Just as the being fully takes on her physical appearance, however, Lena attempts to kill it, using the same kind of grenade her husband used to kill himself.

The sequence is purposefully open to interpretation, suggesting many different forms of self-destruction. Critics have interpreted it in different ways: former Verge culture editor and Vulture film critic Emily Yoshida likened the sequence to an extended, heart-wrenching representation of depression — the ways the disease consumes people, drags them down to the point of exhaustion, and steals and overwrites your entire existence. Matt Goldberg at Collider sees it as a metaphor for cancer, and how the disease turns our own bodies against us.

The most straightforward reading is that Lena, like everyone else in Garland’s worldview in this film, has the innate human impulse to self-destruct, and passes it on to her mirror image. Then she gives it the means in the form of a phosphorous grenade, annihilating both the newly created part of herself and the alien presence invading the Earth. In the closing scene of the film, Lena’s eyes shimmer as she embraces the clone of her husband, suggesting they both were obliterated in different ways, and reconstructed in an act of self-destruction come full circle.

Image: Paramount Pictures

4. The title’s meaning

This may be the most significant point of departure between the film and book. VanderMeer’s novel shares Garland’s idea of self-destruction as a natural, biological human trait, borne from a brew of conscious thought and instinct. But VanderMeer’s writing is often more interested in the idea on a grand ecological scale. In that sense, Annihilation the book doubles as a parable about climate change and the ways the human race is destroying the planet in cancerous, uncontrollable ways.

And so Area X and its effect on organic life is a kind of metaphor for humanity’s destructive nature, twisted into a form we cannot control or even perceive, and used to return power and an agenda to the natural, organic world. That complete breakdown of human rationality and control is the annihilation in VanderMeer’s book, as the biologist and her companions lose the ability to explain, escape, or survive the ways the extraterrestrial entity changes everything it contacts. (There’s also a neat subplot in which the Southern Reach employs a cryptic, systemized version of hypnosis to control almost everyone it employs, and the psychologist’s code word for the all-female expedition to dismantle itself by way of suicide happens to be “annihilation.”)

Garland takes the theme to a more personal end, by considering the annihilation of a sense of self. His title works as a reference to the annihilation of the human race by a superior, more sophisticated life form, a line Dr. Ventress echoes in the film’s final arc. But Garland is fascinated by the personal act of self-destruction, and it’s easy to see why he shied away from the book’s deeper, more dreamlike elements, and focused instead on how it expresses some of his own obsessions.

By not using the Crawler, Garland shrugged off the need to explain the human identity beneath it, which would have shifted the story’s focus, or set up a sequel he’s said he isn’t interested in making. And by focusing on the deconstruction and rebirth of Lena, Kane, and their marriage, Garland has created something human and universal from a narrative that’s purposefully designed to feel inhuman and beyond our collective understanding. The film isn’t the Annihilation that fans of the book were expecting. Even VanderMeer himself notes it’s a “very liberal adaptation.” But it shares the same DNA, refracted and rearranged into something new.

Update at 12:45PM ET, 3/1: Clarified with input from author Jeff VanderMeer that Garland does indeed include the Crawler in the final sequence of the film, but alters it in key ways for the cinematic sequence.