Alex Garland Reveals 10-Minute Shimmer Sequence He Cut From ‘Annihilation’

Audiences didn’t pack cinemas for “Annihilation” this past weekend, but the film is already going down as one of the best sci-fi movies to come along in quite some time. Atmospheric, eerie, and terrifying, Alex Garland‘s adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer‘s novel is as brainy and it is beautiful. The writer/director has already stated numerous times that he took the story from the book and spun off into his own direction, and while “Annihilation” is being lauded for favoring mood over spectacle, it turns out particularly action-packed sequence was dropped from the movie.

Speaking with Collider, Garland revealed that he snipped ten minutes from movie. The scene saw Natalie Portman‘s Lena first encountering The Shimmer through an entirely different chain of events.

“It’s this weird thing that happens in a script to seeing it, that things make sense sometimes when you’re reading it, but when you watch it, it immediately stops making sense. Essentially what happens in the sequence is that Natalie Portman, quite early on in the film is locked in a sort of chamber where she first meets Dr. Ventress and when Ventress leaves, Natalie’s character Lena is stuck there and she escapes from that chamber and knocks out a guard, takes his gun, shoots her way through a glass door, makes her way through the facility and finally busts out and sees the shimmer for the first time,” Garland explained. “It created a problem that her character goes from a state of real adversity with this corporation to then being taken on a mission to this place, and it’s a weird U-turn. And actually, it made more sense that she says I want to see this thing, and Ventress says OK and takes her to see it.”

Remarkably, Garland didn’t have to reshoot the scene but simply re-edited the material he had to seamlessly change how it plays out.

“You use the dialogue, you do a hard cut, you take a little bit of film where she’s walking in her escape but she’s slowed down, she’s not running at that point, she’s walking and you use that bit, you do another hard cut to her stepping out and seeing the shimmer for the first time. Then, the sequence is gone and it makes more logical character sense,” he added.

That’s pretty clever stuff. See go “Annihilation” on the big screen while you can.