Annihilation

Alex Garland’s 2018 film missed cinemas in much of the world for a reason internal to the film. After a poor test screening, financier David Ellison found it too intellectual and too complicated, and asked for Natalie Portman’s character to be softened and the ending changed. Scott Rudin, the producer holding final cut, refused. The December 2017 agreement handed everything outside the United States, Canada and China to Netflix. What you can watch is the version somebody wanted softened and did not get. The story is set in Florida, but the swamp was shot in England. Test footage there showed vegetation so dense that no depth registered on camera, so the unit moved to Windsor Great Park. In the bear scene the decisive element is sound, not image. Its cry in a human voice was not on set; it was added afterwards by the sound department. The score follows the same logic: the composers kept electronics out of the whole film and saved them for the long lighthouse passage. For readers of the novel: the tower and the creature inside it are absent, and characters the book leaves unnamed are given names. For a viewer prepared for a close that is almost wordless and carried by music. Not for a reader waiting on that tower.