The film was recently removed from Netflix but has found a new streaming home.
After its surprise recent removal from Netflix, the brilliant sci-fi thriller Annihilation has just been added to Prime Video.
Written and directed by Alex Garland (Civil War, the currently in cinemas Warfare), the movie stars Oscar-winner Natalie Portman (Black Swan) and is an adaptation of the Jeff VanderMeer novel of the same name.
A loose interpretation of the book, Portman plays Lena in the film – a former US soldier turned cellular biologist.
She is married to Kane (Oscar Isaac), a fellow soldier she met while serving, who is missing and presumed dead. This is after a mysterious mission that the authorities won’t tell Lena about.
One day, though, a severely sick Kane shows up on her doorstep and the pair are quickly whisked away to a secret government facility.
It turns out that three years previously, a meteor struck a lighthouse in the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. The space rock then altered the area, creating a large mysterious bubble around it dubbed The Shimmer, which is gradually expanding and increasing its boundaries.
The government has sent a dozen military teams into the quarantined area, where compasses and communication technology can’t function. But only one person has returned: Kane.
Now, the authorities have a different approach. They want to send a group of female scientists into The Shimmer to study it. Lena volunteers in order to find a way to save her husband.
Teaming with psychologist Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), paramedic Anya (Gina Rodriguez), physicist Josie (Tessa Thompson) and geomorphologist Cass (Tuva Novotny), the five venture into the strange area.
They quickly realise The Shimmer functions by its own rules and poses a huge threat to humanity.
Annihilation boasts a brilliant premise, a truly unique setting and a string of extremely memorable and horrifyingly tense action set pieces.
That said, it’s also a genuinely emotional and intellectual exploration of the nature of humanity and life itself.
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Holding an 88% score on Rotten Tomatoes, you can read a sample of some of the glowing reviews for Annihilation below:
Empire: “Drawing on mythology and body horror, Annihilation is an intelligent film that asks big questions and refuses to provide easy answers. Sci-fi at its best.”
Flavorwire: “This sci-fi/horror hybrid is brainy, challenging, and experimental. Those shouldn’t be dirty words.”
Little White Lies: “Top-notch sci-fi and a chilling allegory for humanity’s capacity for self-destruction.”
News.com.au: “Absorbing and hypnotic, Annihilation is the best kind of sci-fi film – the kind that challenges and subverts the genre, all the while introducing new ideas that you’ll see in films to come.”
ScreenCrush: “When people say a movie ‘made their skin crawl’, they don’t usually mean it literally. In this case, I do: This movie made me physically uncomfortable in my own skin.”
Times (UK): “It’s audacious stuff, topped by a lovely twist ending, and deserving of more than a casual skim through on an iPad.”
A behind-the-scenes clash between financiers and producers on the sci-fi, which you can read a JOE article about here, is believed to be one of the reasons why the movie was initially released in cinemas in North America and China but on streaming everywhere else.
How to watch Annihilation
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Annihilation is streaming in Ireland and the UK on Prime Video.
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