Writer-director Alex Garland continues his assault on human specialness (and humanity in general), this time going so far as to loop in the self among the parts of us subject to genetic malleability. He does a neat job of it, noting that we die naturally because of a fault in our genes, and that we behave in self-destructive ways because of a fault in our…selves. “These aren’t decisions; they’re impulses,” observes the film’s psychologist — you know, a person who studies the soul. (Read: the ruin is built right in!) Further, the particular threat borne by the film’s rocky messenger from the heavens — not so much an angel of death as an agent of change — works to remove us from the drama of our own obsolescence. (At least in his previous feature, Ex Machina, humanity had a hand in crafting its replacement, even as that was presented less as a moral choice and more as an evolutionary necessity.) The story concerns the efforts of a soldier-scientist (Natalie Portman) to undo the damage done by her own self-destructive tendencies by going into The Shimmer, the mysterious and metastasizing region around ground zero. She’s joined by a team of equally damaged experts — all women, because all the all-male teams never came back — and together, they seek to unravel the mystery of a land where nature seems to have gone berserk at the intracellular level. This gives Garland a chance to go a little berserk himself with the visuals — you may have a hard time looking at molds and fungi for a while, even if you grant the unsettling appeal of his landscapes — while he slows the action to something approaching stately, presumably to give the meaning (or maybe the lack of it) time to sink in. The result is a film that is fascinating (in the sense of “bewitching”) but a bit hard to watch. (2018) — Matthew Lickona
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