Explaining the ending of Alex Garland movie ‘Annihilation’
Taking to screenwriting like a duck to water, Alex Garland seamlessly segued into the film industry and displayed a knack for heightened genre fare by penning 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go, and Dredd before notching an Academy Award nomination in the ‘Best Original Screenplay’ category for his directorial debut Ex Machina, prior to tackling literary adaptation Annihilation.
Jeff VanderMeer’s source material hardly lent itself to the movie treatment, combining elements of science fiction, horror, and psychological thrills amidst a narrative dripping in metaphysical angst and existential dread. It’s a strange book, and by extension, it required a strange film.
That’s exactly what audiences got when Garland’s Annihilation dropped in cinemas in February 2018, where it failed to recoup its estimated $55million budget at the box office before finding more favour on Netflix, winning plenty of acclaim along the way for its imagination and ambition.
It’s a difficult feature to describe, which is precisely what Garland wanted, creating a genre-bending nightmare that toys with the concepts of reality, self-destruction, and choice.
What is Annihilation about?
Natalie Portman heads up the star-studded cast as soldier-turned-biologist Lena, who joins a mission to discover what happened to her husband – Oscar Isaac’s Kane – inside the ominous Area X, a mysterious phenomenon that’s beginning to spread across the coastline.
The intrepid team of expeditions – including Tuva Novotny’s Cass, Gina Rodriguez’s Anya, and Tessa Thompson’s Josie – venture inward at the behest of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Dr Ventress, only to discover a phantasmagorical world of mutated landscapes, terrifying creatures, and an unnerving force known as ‘The Shimmer’.
What happens at the end of Annihilation?
At the end of Annihilation, Lena ends up destroying The Shimmer – or at least so she thought – before returning to her regular life to be reunited with Kane. Except, it might not really be him, but rather the doppelgänger that emerged from Area X earlier on in the story.
She decides to ask him, and even he can’t be sure whether or not he’s the real deal before Lena’s own eyes gleam in an eerie style reminiscent of The Shimmer. While it’s easy to believe Garland’s intention was to have the audience question whether or not Lena is also an imposter, that theory doesn’t really hold the largest amount of water.
After all, she’d blown up her own doppelgänger before making her escape from Area X and gets away from The Shimmer, which would negate the hints of alien assimilation. However, it doesn’t discount the possibility that she’s become something else entirely, the next step in humanity’s evolution that’s been permanently altered by her encounter.
Is Lena an alien at the end of Annihilation?
For his part, Garland wouldn’t be drawn on what it means from his perspective, although he did confirm in an interview with Thrillist that it’s open for discussion. “If someone comes up with a different interpretation, I don’t go, ‘That’s wrong.’ I go, ‘That’s interesting,'” he clarified. “I haven’t read everything, so I don’t know, but there were a couple of things that I noticed weren’t getting noticed, perhaps because they were a bit too obscure”.
While it doesn’t make complete sense relative to the events that preceded it for Lena to have been replaced by a doppelgänger, it’s seriously hinted that The Shimmer has, at the very least, permanently altered her DNA in some fashion, which isn’t going to be good for humanity in the long run. Either that or the switcheroo happened before Lena and Not Lena’s final showdown at the lighthouse, with The Shimmer simply waltzing back into civilisation and assuming her life.
Garland refuses to sanction a definitive answer, leaving it entirely open to debate. Either perspective has its own pros and cons, but with self-destruction and rebirth having been such a prevalent theme throughout Annihilation, the real Lena being destroyed and replaced by something brand new – in this case, part human and part alien – leans further into the recurring motif than a straightforward swap.
Is the movie’s ending the same as the book?
In a word, no. While the events are largely comparable on both page and screen, Garland deviated substantially from VanderMeer’s novel when wrapping up his feature-length genre-bender.
In the book, the biologist opts to stay in Area X and continue exploring its further reaches. There’s still the confrontation between the character and a creature, but at no point in the conclusion to VanderMeer’s Annihilation does the protagonist of the story exit Area X to reunite with either her husband or his doppelgänger, as she does in the film.
Instead, exploration takes precedence, with the author thrilled to see Garland put his own stamp on the finale. “The ending is so mind-blowing and in some ways different from the book that it seems to be the kind of ending that, like 2001 or something like that, people will be talking about around the watercooler for years,” he told ScreenRant. “Visually, it’s amazing. I must say that and that’s all I probably should say”.
Garland’s Annihilation was equally as open-ended and ambiguous, but whereas VanderMeer would pen literary sequels Authority and Acceptance, the movie’s director wanted to close the loop and tell a story that wasn’t designed to be carried on but still left the door open for further debate on what it really meant.
