Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation was published in 2014, and adapted by director Alex Garland into a movie by the same name that released in 2018. The movie does something unusual for modern adaptations: it breaks the book down to its component pieces, and reassembles them into something designed to work in its new medium. I’m not sure the end result is the best movie ever, but I really loved this approach to adapting between mediums and I’d like to talk about why.

Note about spoilers: I’m not going to go out of my way to spoil either the book or the movie in this post, but there will be some discussion of the events of both. I don’t think this would ruin the experience for you if you haven’t read or seen one of them, but read on at your own risk.

Annihilation-the-book falls solidly in the weird fiction slash cosmic horror genre. The central conflict is between the characters – a team of four unnamed women – and Area X, the environment they’re tasked with investigating. The protagonist, also known as “the biologist”, discovers a large structure she calls “the tower” with a circular staircase descending into the earth carved inside. Written along the walls in a fluorescent lichen is a poem starting with “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead . . .” and continuing deeper into the passage.

That night the anthropologist, another member of the biologist’s party, is sent into the tunnel to continue following the trail of writing but doesn’t return; her body is discovered deep into the passage amid a flurry of tracks of dried slime, sample test tubes strewn all around it, killed by the creature that has been transcribing the writing on the wall. This creature, which the biologist starts calling “The Crawler”, becomes the ostensible antagonist of the story, and the climax of the story comes towards the end of the book when the biologist finally encounters The Crawler..

For our first potential spoiler, here’s how Vandermeer describes The Crawler in that scene:

No words can … no photographs could …

As I adjusted to the light, the Crawler kept changing at a lightning pace, as if to mock my ability to comprehend it. It was a figure within a series of refracted panes of glass. It was a series of layers in the shape of an archway. It was a great slug-like monster ringed by satellites of even odder creatures. It was a glistening star. My eyes kept glancing off of it as if an optic nerve was not enough.

Then it became an overwhelming hugeness in my battered vision, seeming to rise and keep rising as it leapt toward me. The shape spread until it was even where it was not, or should not have been. It seemed now more like a kind of obstacle or wall or thick closed door blocking the stairs. Not a wall of light—gold, blue, green, existing in some other spectrum—but a wall of flesh that resembled light, with sharp, curving elements within it and textures like ice when it has frozen from flowing water. An impression of living things lazily floating in the air around it like soft tadpoles, but at the limits of my vision so I could not tell if this was akin to those floating dark motes that are tricks of the eye, that do not exist.

How do you adapt that to film? Alex Garland’s answer is: you don’t. From the opening seconds of the movie, it’s obvious that you’re watching a different take on the story. Instead of dropping you directly into Area X like in the books, we start with a lecture on cancer from the biologist, named Lena in the adaption. Shots of Lena’s home show she and her husband have a military background, where both are civilians in the book. When the team enters Area X, called The Shimmer in the movie, they’re all carrying military-issue assault rifles, not the “antique handguns” from the book.

One of the most interesting changes here is how a lot of the details of the original story have been refracted through the lens of American military science fiction and horror. The military is a much stronger presence here than in the book; Lena served in the army and her husband appears to be some sort of unnamed special forces commando whose final assignment is a mission in The Shimmer. This shapes the overall arc of the story as well. The book is about the biologist entering Area X and being slowly consumed by it, and ultimately deciding to stay and continue exploring. Movie Lena enters the shimmer, battles the creatures created by it, and (spoilers) ultimately emerges after killing an alien double with a phosphorus grenade, her conquest complete.

There’s a lot of ways to interpret these changes, but I think a good explanation is that the movie is trying to tell the story of the book using a language that viewers are already familiar with. Fans of other 2010s science fiction (Arrival comes to mind as a great example) will immediately recognize the style of the movie, whether it’s the cinematography or the linear storytelling interspersed with flashbacks. The presence of the military is another big tip-off about this. The movie doesn’t have any particular commentary on the military-industrial complex, or foreign interventions, or any other topical issues – it’s just that viewers are used to seeing former or current soldiers with M16 assault rifles on screen.

As an aside, I think the ubiquity of the US military in science fiction is an interesting shift. While writing this I was thinking about how a lot of science fiction from before the 90s and 00s has a much lighter or even nonexistent military presence – The Thing was what came to mind. It’s something I’m interested to research more, since a a lot of the reporting I’ve read about the military/Hollywood relationship doesn’t really acknowledge that there’s been any kind of shift.

I don’t love every decision made here – do we really need another military sci-fi horror story, when we could have told this story in a different way? But I respect the approach a lot. Imagine if Denis Villeneuve’s Dune renamed the protagonist of the book, changed the arc of the story, and rewrote several major themes to try to fit the medium of film better. To take a movie that’s already out of writing this, what if the 2013 Ender’s Game adaptation had actually cut out enough from the book to fit in a 2 hour screening without feeling like it was doing a speed run of the original plot.

I think what that takes is either a property like Annihilation without a big, angry fanbase, or the kind of courage in the face of fan backlash that’s been rare in recent adaptations. The upcoming Netflix Cowboy Bebop adaptation was what got me thinking about this originally, particularly this tweet:

Netflix with millions / a girl with 100 dollars. pic.twitter.com/zmND86cBQX

— Angry Crow (Open comms)🇻🇪 (@Angry_Crow24) August 30, 2021

This got shit for a lot of reasons, but I’d like to suggest that character depicted in the live action show actually looks too much like the original character from the animated series. I think we can all guess what angle the original poster is coming at this from, but the idea that a lot of anime looks like shittier cosplay is not off the mark. There’s a lot of reasons for that, but I’d suggest that one is that the adaptations are trying too hard to directly adapt the original source material, up to the point of trying to have actors dressed in copies of the costumes from the animated series.

Because you can’t ever have someone in the real world who looks as stylish, or colorful, or moves as fluidly as an animated character, you’re inevitably going to fail there. Circling back to Annihilation, it’s like if Alex Garland had tried to faithfully commit The Crawler, which “no words can … no photographs could … " depict, to film. Of course he would’ve failed, and the result would have been a cheap copy of the book that neither fans nor new viewers would have enjoyed. What the Annihilation movie really gets is that the best way to pay homage to a great work in one medium is to remix it, add in some themes and textures of your own, and try to play to the strengths of the new medium.

Is Annihilation a good movie, on its own merits? I’m not actually sure I can answer that – I should probably watch it again. Watching it the first time, I was initially confused because my TV was only showing the top left corner of the film, then confused because I realized it wasn’t following the story of the book at all, then extremely satisfied about the fact that I was watching something very different from the book I’d just read.

The differences between the two threw me pleasantly off balance and I ended up really enjoying having a second set of mysteries to solve rather than a rehash of ones I’d already seen. And now I’m a little sad knowing that the movie took an unusual approach to adapting the book that I’m unlikely to find anywhere else.