As time goes on, there is one thing that becomes clearer: the past. While most of us spend the present mistaking the forest for the trees, we can look back to years past and understand the good and bad. Having a sense of certainty is comforting because there is no way to be bombarded with a surprise. You can look at World War II in 2020 and have this understanding that it all ends at some point. While TV series like Hunters and The Plot Against America suggest that fascism still exists in some form, the grand scale events of WWII have come and gone. We don’t have to worry anymore about turning our lights off at night so that we don’t get bombed.
From a historical standpoint, we could never fully understand the story because we weren’t there. As much as WWII is rooted in facts, there is something to be said about rationing supplies and having that lingering dread that a bomb was about to be dropped overhead. Some of it may have been irrational, but it was a real fear at the time. There was no certainty that everything would be fine because there was a war on. How long could it possibly last? After all, there was The Hundred Year War and Hitler was an ornery S.O.B.
That is the sensation that I feel now amid the Coronavirus pandemic. This isn’t just another Zika virus. This is one that forced businesses to close, people to be trapped in their homes as the TV tallied up the death rate. There is no certainty anymore. It messes with your head. In Southern California, there is currently a rainstorm passing through, so the sky is constantly overcast and the grey clouds cannot help but incite further dread. On some level, it’s reprogramming the foundation of our character.
I doubt future generations will truly be able to understand the sensation of the world being stuck indoors all day, unsure when life will return to normal. That may explain why people have turned to the 2011 film Contagion, but that doesn’t really create a sense of how these events make us feel on the inside. If there were any films that could encapsulate the internal struggle of our every day, one doesn’t turn to realism. They need to turn…
Into the Unknown!
Okay, let me explain for a minute. There is no way that Disney could predict the current pandemic. It would be downright foolish to think otherwise. What I’m saying is that Frozen II (2019) creates a more youthful understanding of how crazy these current times are. It’s one that is presented with an eventual optimism that will comfort those during these trying times.
The story follows Elsa as she hears a literal call to action. During a game of charades, she hears a distant cry (AURORA) that draws her to explore “the unknown” called The Enchanted Forest. It’s a place beyond her understanding, where magic exists and the world becomes scary. There’s a disastrous tornado, lizards made of fire, and a tribe of people who have practically been quarantined for decades. It’s a scary world and one that presents the best outlook for these troubling times.
Elder Cunningham himself Josh Gad provides the voice of snowman Olaf as he wanders around The Enchanted Forest. He’s singing this upbeat ditty “When I Am Older,” which is a comical little bit about the dangers in the woods. They’re all attacking Olaf as he copes with the moment by singing:
I'll have all the answers when I'm older
Like why we're in this dark enchanted wood
I know in a couple years
These will seems like childish fears
And so I know this isn't bad, it's good
There is some satire to this number, but the intent makes perfect sense. Just because things are terrible now doesn’t mean that we can’t grow and learn from them. We are given challenges in life, and sometimes we need to face them head-on. This will all make sense later, but for now, it’s important to stay positive. It’s a theme throughout the entire movie, though the songs are handled more deftly as the story reaches full self-quarantining imagery as Elsa travels into a cave to find clues to the past. She is isolated with nothing but her thoughts, discovering that what she had been taught as a child wasn’t entirely accurate. Like her sister Anna, they needed time apart to understand what value they brought to each other.
For those who need something a bit more surreal and adult, then please turn your attention to director Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018), which Letterboxd assures me is the same film as Frozen II. On some level, it’s hard not to see the argument. In the broad strokes, both are about groups traveling into foreign environments to find a world mutated, whether by magic or an unknown force. For Annihilation, The Shimmer is this unknown world and Lena is the audience’s guide.
The only real difference is that this isn’t a Disney world. By agreeing to travel into the unknown, you are accepting the potential for danger. Yes, there is danger in Frozen II, but it would be foolish to think that Disney would outright murder their most successful franchise in decades. No, they get the friendly-looking creatures with big eyes, and forests lined with soft lighting and people singing Bryan Adams-inspired numbers. It also wouldn’t go nearly as surreal and cryptic as Annihilation does by the end because, let’s be honest, parents are complaining about how a character who is not even gay for a whole sentence in Onwards (2020) is super offensive. They can’t take nuance well.
Garland is a different beast entirely. Anyone who knows Ex Machina (2015) or the TV series Devs will be quick to recognize how much he’s into science fiction and fantasy to question humanity’s impact on the world. With Annihilation, he made the text so literal that you can’t help but see it as some commentary on our changing world.
The Shimmer is consuming our planet. From the outside, its texture has the pink and purplish shines that one could find blowing bubbles, but with a sludgier effect. Inside it’s a much different ecosystem literally. Lena’s husband may have emerged, but he’s clearly not the same. The Shimmer changes people, and the quest to find answers becomes a fool’s mission. Even as they send in a group of female scientists, there is uncertainty. The only thing giving them an edge is that they all have some emotional damage, making them strong to whatever trauma lies inside.
Unlike Frozen II, the new ecosystem is unlike anything seen before. Crocodiles have new rows of teeth. There are horrifying bears that use vocal replication to lure in their targets. The plants have DNA strands that are far different than anything we’ve seen before. The genetics are not entirely destructive and instead mold them into some new form of life.
There have been few films that have been as indicative as to how I feel about the self-quarantine culture than Annihilation’s wandering around in The Shimmer. One can forget that these characters are wandering around the Earth because, let’s face it, everything is so different and scary. The sky is not a conventional blue, instead looking just as uneasy as our mental psyches. Lena’s barely holding on and her team isn’t doing any better. The obstacles become more difficult, especially as she doubts any chances of survival. Will she get out of this alive? By the end, it goes from a generalization for the group to a statement about her, following the last of the team falling into madness that eats them whole.
Warning: Super trippy
Like Elsa, she is drawn to this ambiguous location that holds deeper answers. Only she may enter and discover what they are. Lena finds a lighthouse that holds answers to the previous failed mission. In one of the great moments of contemporary fantasy cinema, she is confronted by an alien who drove her husband mad before performing a ballet.
To say that it could be spoiled would be like saying any passage of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake ruins the rest of the show. It exists as this haunting piece of an alien force “mirroring” Lena. What exactly it is doing isn’t clear, but there are moments that suggest portals to other universes and destructions of an old one. The score by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow is phenomenally queasy as it builds to the cry of an alien. Much like AURORA in Frozen II, there is but a simple passage communicated to our protagonist. Unlike Frozen II, it’s one so deep and inhuman that it never sets right with the viewer.
Still, this journey into the unknown captures man’s obsession with finding answers. As the world crumbles, Lena can’t just let it be destroyed. The queasy tone around her makes us uncomfortable, wishing to find a way out. Instead, we’re trapped in a ballet of worlds colliding. We want a clear answer, but only those willing to look at the ambiguity are likely to make any sense of it. Whereas Frozen II presented a clearer message about kindness to others, Annihilation is posing a question about life and evolution. It starts with Lena providing a lecture on a mutation of cells and ends with the feeling of new life as if the alien is trying to replicate their world in its image.
The film’s opening and closing scene may as well be the poster child for the feeling of being self-quarantined as well. In a literal sense, she has been introduced to a foreign compound. With nobody sure if they carry the Coronavirus, it’s a familiar image. Outside are doctors, looking into Lena’s walled-off area, asking questions about her experiences. They must know if she’s contaminated for fear of what she could bestow on the public. Her husband’s inability to survive in the real world could’ve been more caustic, and the same fate lies for her. Even then, she is traumatized by his demise. Still, she is being judged by others, isolated in her own way from a world that would rather play it safe than even enter the same room. They ask her what the alien wanted, and she claims that they didn’t seem invasive at all. They simply wanted to live here in peace. Humanity will fall to its own self-destruction if it thinks to get in the way. The Shimmer will live on whether you like it or not. It is not going to destroy the world, but make it a very different place to live.
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| Though they do have some awesome wildlife |
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| Go, water horse! |
Throughout cinema’s history, there have been many ways to depict isolation while becoming infected with a foreign disease. It’s a common fear no matter where you’re from. The idea that your life will be uprooted permanently is a scary subject, and right now it especially feels like everyone is Lena. If you’re at home, you’re being looked at like an object in a museum. How could anything possibly survive? If you’re outside, there is something different about the atmosphere. Even if your local gas station hasn’t changed one bit there is still this ambiance that something is different. You can’t explain it, but you keep going out of some hope that you are greater.
Frozen II presents “the unknown” as something more positive: a world that is merely misunderstood out of some personal misunderstanding. Everything will make sense when it’s said and done. For Annihilation, it also enters “the unknown” with a very different approach. Sure it ends with some truth that humanity is more destructive than any alien force, but what is the danger heading our way? There is bound to be some personal impact that alters our personality. Maybe it won’t be something as permanent as DNA changes, but it will feel like we’re dancing with surreal forces outside of our control on some days as we long for a return to normalcy. Even the fact that The Shimmer is consuming the Earth suggests a dread that makes Lena more of a warning call of change to come. But should we be afraid?
Maybe the best answer lies somewhere in between.
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