The best thing about Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy is its uncompromising weirdness — its straightforward facing of the possibility that, should we ever make contact with an alien intelligence, that intelligence might be so alien that we simply cannot understand it at all, in any way — that its motives (if it has “motives”) and its technology (if it has “technology”) could be so utterly disconnected from what we think of as motives and technology as to be utterly inscrutable. The movie Annihilation is pretty weird at times, but not nearly as weird as its source material, and its steady domestication of that material takes the edge off the story. In the moments that it embraces the weirdness, it’s memorable, but there aren’t very any such moments. It’s okay; but no more than okay.
