10 Alien Invasion Movies Where Humanity Loses

A bellwether for the string of rather depressing films Alex Garland would go on to inflict on us in the years after its release, Annihilation offers a glimpse into a world that fully sees the aliens coming, and knows the kind of threat they pose, but hasn’t the practical resources to deal with them.

A meteor lands on a lighthouse in the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, Florida, and develops a hallucinogenic bubble that observers call the Shimmer, which gradually expands outwards, subsuming the local flora and fauna. Natalie Portman is Lena, a biologist and US army vet whose boyfriend went AWOL in the Shimmer and came back changed. Now, she endeavours to undertake a last-ditch scientific expedition into the strangeness to see what can be done about it before it’s too late.

Unfortunately, not much can be done. Once inside, Lena and her team find the Shimmer absorbs and mutates everything within its field of influence, including them. While they succeed in blowing the thing up, the conclusion of the film shows the aliens are already deep among us, as while both Lena and her boyfriend have their original memories, they are in fact the hivemind alien substance, and nobody even realises. And we know there’s nothing it can’t assimilate.