Alex Garland is one of those people under-the-radar with mostly his writing abilities during his collaboration with fellow director Danny Boyle with 28 Days Later and Sunshine. However, he made quite an impact with his excellent 2015 movie, Ex Machina, a movie that challenged you in how the future could be impacted surrounding a Turing test between a male and a female, for that instance, a robot. Now, with this movie, Garland has created a movie that is even more challenging and more intellectual than most movies released. I had to ponder whether if the story had earned the right to become a greater product than a greater concept and the answer is that it does not earn it completely in spite of its high concept.
The movie has Lena (Natalie Portman), a cellular biologist and former U.S. army soldier, discovering that her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac), missing for a while but *minor spoiler* returns after a year. However, on the way to the hospital because Kane suffering some sort of disease, they get abducted by a government organization called the Southern Reach. Lena meets Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who informs her that he was the only survivor of the expedition from this bubble called "The Shimmer", when an object struck a lighthouse three years earlier.
After hearing the condition of her husband, Lena volunteers to go into the Shimmer. Alongside her and Dr. Ventress as the leader of the expedition are Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson), a physicist, Cass Shepherd (Tuva Novotny), an anthropologist, and Anya Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez), a paramedic. Lena decides not tell the others that her husband was part of the previous expedition. With the lack of the GPS system, they use the position of the sun to go to a boathouse to discover anomalous plant life, where the species are cross-breeding.
I had to think long and hard about what I had seen after the whole movie was over. I will start off by saying that this movie is going to make people either loving this or hating this. I was closer to loving it but not completely because of three reasons, two little ones and a big one. 1) I felt that there were pacing issues and he could've cut 5-10 minutes in there that could have been left as deleted scenes on the blu-ray or DVD. I felt that it was a bit irrelevant to the tone where it included a sub-plot that felt a bit re-hashed from a romantic drama that persuaded Kane to go inside The Shimmer in the first place. It felt tacked on.
Now, I will say the performances are quite solid especially Natalie Portman's, as I sympathized with her character even the one sub-plot that I cannot reveal has made her make a couple of mistakes that affects the whole story from a personal angle. She gives a calmingly powerful performance as it gradually builds to close out her arc after the movie is finished. Jennifer Jason Leigh has some great intellectual conversations with Portman about why Portman volunteered to go on the mission. And, out of nowhere, Novotny has a bit of sadness underneath her character once revealed during the mission that you root for to make it out of there. However, alluding to the second problem, Gina Rodriguez, however, plays the tough paramedic that makes a decision out of nowhere that makes not much sense to the story and her arc is left unfinished and a bit one-dimensional as is Tessa Thompson's character arc, more unfinished than one-dimensional.
The big and final reason that it is not a great sci-fi movie because of its ending as it reveals sort of a social message towards the end that felt anticlimactic than surprising like Ex Machina. You see Ex Machina plays you like the Turing Test and then you, the audience, are played because of its resolution. Here, it seems that you come out of it with questions and a discourse, that leaves you with many theories that you and some people can come up with. And, that is fine, but I felt that the ending did not earn that ambiguity plus I think I know what ultimately happens. However, I liked its ambitious and challenging storytelling a whole lot in its first two-thirds accompanied by it moody score by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury and its beautifully striking visual effects that it felt like I was in another world. This is a keen style of storytelling by Garland that is full of wonder but almost attains of completing his product with such conviction. There could have been a bit of clean-up in its screenplay.
***1/2
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