10 Movie Messages Everybody Misunderstood

5. It's An Allegory For Depression (Not Climate Change) - Annihilation

What Everybody Thinks

Alex Garland's incredible adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's sci-fi novel is centred around a group of military scientists who visit the mysterious extraterrestrial zone known as the Shimmer. Inside, humans and animals find themselves mutated by its DNA-refracting qualities, changing them forever more.

The deeper allegorical meaning of the movie has been extensively debated, with many believing it to be a commentary on climate change, and how the "cancerous" Shimmer mutates the world in much the same irreparable way that climate change does.

This was certainly an apparent theme in VanderMeer's book, so you can at least see where people were coming from.

The Real Message

But Garland's film is no straight adaptation of the source material, and his story has its focus trained far more specifically on the struggle of its focal individuals rather than Earth as a whole.

A clear theme in the movie - especially in the third act - is the notion of self-destruction, with two characters literally destroying secondary versions of themselves with grenades. But more specifically, Annihilation is an allegory for depression.

There are many, many signposts for this throughout the film - time passes faster in the Shimmer (depressed people often struggle to maintain a sense of time), the journey into the Shimmer itself comes with a high level of risk (and the scientists know this), and the Shimmer's destructive tendencies themselves reflect the apathetic nature of mental illness, arriving and consuming without any palpable reason.

This is perhaps best visualised when protagonist Lena (Natalie Portman) literally battles a doppelgänger of herself, reflecting an internal struggle and one that very nearly sees her suffocated against a door by "herself."

That some part of the Shimmer ultimately appears to reside within Lena even once she escapes it seems further indicative of depression, which can be quelled but never decisively destroyed.