The Corruption
As Lena, Dr. Ventress and the rest explore the Shimmer, they soon find out that the place is packed with twisted and often terrifying creatures—things that have taken on the DNA of other things and made it their own. And those creatures aren’t the only things being changed. The explorers are, too.
But, let’s face it, they were broken to begin with.
Annihilation is obsessed with themes of self-destruction. We get our first inkling of that early early on, Lena and Kane talk about the “mistakes” of God. Cells, Lena insists, are designed to split and duplicate for eternity. They are, in theory, immortal. The fact that we grow old and sick and die is a flaw in design, she says: Our cells shouldn’t self-destruct like that, unless a mistake was made along the way.
If Lena read her biblical creation stories more carefully, she would find that back in Eden, before our own dramatic fall, we were designed to live forever. And in chapter six of Genesis, God essentially puts a cap on how old we can actually get.
Why was that immortality taken away from us? The Bible suggests that it was because of our own sin. When Adam and Eve ate that infamous forbidden fruit, it got the ball rolling, and all downhill. Our sin sowed the seeds for our own self-destruction.
Annihilation says that our sins are still doing the exact same thing.
“Almost none of us commit suicide,” someone says. “Almost all of us self-destruct.” And so we see in Lena and her team members. One is a recovering drug and alcohol addict. Another’s arms are covered with scars, evidence of self-harm. Still another had an affair. Almost everyone began to self-destruct in some way. Given these themes of self-destruction, I think it’s significant that the name of Lena’s husband, Kane, again pulls us back to Genesis. Cain, of course, was a man who destroyed himself by destroying someone else,
And in most of these folks, those “sins” become a conduit for whatever the Shimmer want to do to them.
The addict gets jumpy and anxious, as if going through withdrawal. Even more tellingly, she sees things crawling underneath her skin. (She probably really does have things wriggling around in there, because the movie goes there, but it’s also sometimes a symptom of drug use and overdose.) The cutter finds that things are growing out of her scars.
Even when moral failings aren’t part of the equation, physical failings and corruptions are. Annihilation references cancer again and again—a disease in which a creature’s very cells become twisted and misshapen. And someone who has cancer in the movie seems to be destroyed, or transformed, from the inside out—a betrayal of her very body.
But as Annihilation goes on, Lena questions whether what’s happening in the Shimmer is all bad.
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