compendium ➦
Blackwater National Park reported that a lighthouse was surrounded by something they termed, a shimmer. We've sent in drones, animals, and teams of people — but nothing comes back. And the boundary is expanding.
In this fan-edit of Annihilation, I take you into the shimmer straight away. In the original film we wait 30 minutes to cross the boundary, but in this edit we cross the boundary at just 3 minutes. With the anomaly in front and the military in back, the audience can understand the situation without a word of dialog. I moved the exposition scenes from the beginning of the film to later and I reframed them as a flashback.
I also removed the college and infidelity scenes. The infidelity wasn't in the book and it feels like the movie added that to give the protagonist more motivation. But I think the mystery of what happened to her dying husband is already enough motivation, and there's no catharsis or resolution to the infidelity angle. In this edit, Lena's only backstory is that her husband was in a previous expedition, and even that is revealed slowly rather than expositioned up front.
And finally I moved the meteor strike from the beginning of the film to the end of Act 2, which keeps more mystery about the source of the shimmer, and I combined the meteor strike with a selection from the Lacrimosa cosmos scene in The Tree Of Life, which adds a sense of both wonder and suspense to the moment when Lena arrives at the climactic lighthouse.
The original film's runtime is: 1h 55m
This edit's runtime is: 1h 30m (Time cut: 25m)
Demo clips
The Shimmer (1h30m)
Blackwater National Park reported that a lighthouse was surrounded by something they termed, a shimmer. We've sent in drones, animals, and teams of people — but nothing comes back. And the boundary is expanding.
Sources: Annihilation, The Tree of Life
✉ APreciousBlueberry@protonmail.com