Ex Machina2014
Annihilation2018Men
Alex Garland/Films directed

Alex Garland is an English novelist, screenwriter, film producer and director. He is best known for the films Ex Machina (2015) and Annihilation (2018). Garland’s others works as a writer includes The Beach (2000), 28 Days Later (2002), Sunshine (2007), Never Let Me Go (2011) and Dredd (2012).

However, what really sealed its fate as a standalone film, and a beautiful one at that, was its director, Alex Garland’s single-handed determination in seeing this as an individual project, and not the beginning of a possible franchise. Resultant, as of today, there is virtually no talk of an ‘Annihilation’ sequel.

His second novel, The Tesseract (1998), is a thriller, set in Manila, and was also made into a film. Alex Garland went on to write the screenplay for Danny Boyle’s films, 28 Days Later (2002), and the tense thriller, Sunshine (2007).

Alex Garland
Annihilation/Directors

Paloma Baeza
Alex Garland/Spouse

Annihilation/Screenplay

The tattoo in Annihilation seems to be a mark of the Shimmer. The team determines that the Shimmer is refracting DNA, combining all living things and changing them simultaneously. Maybe someone in the Shimmer had it, and now the tattoo is being refracted onto other people, or it’s a mark of the entity itself.

Release. Due to a poorly received test screening, David Ellison, a financier and producer at Skydance, became concerned that the film was “too intellectual” and “too complicated”, and demanded changes to make it appeal to a wider audience, including making Portman’s character more sympathetic, and changing the ending.

Lena and Kane, it turns out, were not happily married. She was cheating on him with a colleague and he knew it; she blames herself for him entering what could have been a suicide mission. Her choice to enter the Shimmer is a form of punishment and atonement.