I’ve been inspired by Hideo Kojima for almost as long as I’ve been a game developer. And yet, when I bought his new book, The Creative Gene, it was not with the intention to read it. Not knowing much about it, I anticipated a ghost-written debacle full of mundane trivia. It could at least become a nice coffee table decoration, I thought.
I thought wrong.
Annihilation is not an easy film. Not consumable enough for general audience, but much larger than indie movies. The characters are complicated, but hard to relate to. Approach realistic, but overly simplified. Too fantastic for a sci-fi, too scientific to be a fantasy.
The film struggles to fit into well understood boxes, perhaps one of the reasons why it flopped so much that its European cinema release got cancelled. Yet, despite all of this, I found it to be an excellent film. Or rather, exactly because of this.
Annihilation masterfully exploits the uncanny valley. The term is used when something that’s not a human expresses certain human features, for example appearance or movement, but goes too far in pursuit of realism and ends up no longer stylized, yet not fully life-like. Unpleasant. Uncomfortable. Uncanny.
[Warning: The rest of the article contains spoilers for Annihilation.]