Culture Crash: Adapting a Book Into a Movie: Annihilation (2019 version)

Welcome to Culture Crash, where we examine American culture – what’s new and old in entertainment.

Adapting a book into a movie can be tricky. The Lord of the Rings movies were praised for how faithful they were, but Peter Jackson’s subsequent Hobbit trilogy was criticized for stretching its source material too thin. The Harry Potter movies are beloved, but can never quite capture the magic of the books, in part because of the condensing that needed to take place to turn long books into palatable movies.

But few adaptations go the route of Annihilation. The movie was written and directed by Alex Garland and is based on the book of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer.

Garland has gone on the record explaining that he wrote the script after having read the source book one time, and didn’t even bother to try to adapt it page-by-page. And readers of the book can understand that decision – Annihilation is an ethereal stream-of-consciousness kind of book that may defy adaptation.

So the end result is a movie and book experience that are wildly individual. The basic architecture remains the same – an inexplicable force of nature is consuming a swampy area and a group of explorers head in to discover what is happening, and why. But the characters’ motivations, decisions, and even the nature of the land they are exploring are fundamentally different things.

The debate has been raging about how successful the movie version is, and ultimately, it depends on what you want from an adaptation. For me, the movie actually elevates the material. Garland has tweaked the story to examine the nature of change and why humans act the way they do. The movie gives audiences a lot to think about…and it gives us this cool new musical cue: [music playing].

Sometimes, we just want to see a beloved story play out exactly as we imagined. But with Annihilation, an abstract story that defies easy explanation, a departure from the source material feels just right.

Annihilation the book is available online and in stores now.

I’m Evan Rook.