what is thoughtful about this film?
what question is asked or answered? what meaning is there? what scene or character triggers what kind of emotion?
part of what makes a good art film is that it presents interesting pieces that all fit perfectly together, but doesn't tell you how to respond to them. this can't help but sound pretentious, because it would take a longer post than this to fully explain any one thing. i don't really want to write that but i guess maybe i would. anyway, some pieces:
the subject: confronting death and what that means to the identity. death in a literal sense and death of the self. it is about the self-destructive nature of our actions, our inability to turn away from death, and our inability to understand or reason with it. all of this is mentioned explicitly in dialogue, particularly by ventress, from the definition of senescence to the multiple mentions of cancer, "self-destruction", and all the main characters wanting to die. (i actually thought the dialogue was bludgeoning and unnecessary, and was very happy when it stopped)
the shimmer: a literal cancerous growth upon the world. the shimmer is a state of reality emanating from the meteorite, ever growing. it has no purpose, no will, no consciousness, no guidance. it simply grows, and the way it does that is by taking whatever it touches and twisting it together, cloning without knowing how to "correctly" do so. sometimes the results are beautiful, sometimes hideous. lena is introduced giving a lecture about cancer. this is not a coincidence. she (the movie) is telling us how the shimmer works. it isn't explained any further because there's nothing further to explain. like a tumor, that's just what it does.
the journey: it's never quite clear what this is meant to accomplish, because the characters themselves don't know. they each have a feeling, at varying levels of explicitness, that there is something they need to do (die), and that it lies within the shimmer (the state of dying). they believe they are ready to confront the unknown (afterlife), and acknowledge that they probably won't come back (death), and that if they don't go now, it will catch up to them later anyway (age, sickness, accident).
the characters: i'm not going to do them all, but each character has a specific piece of baggage that is reflected in her fate. the woman whose daughter died says that she died with her - after lena discovers her corpse, she glimpses two strange animals resembling a doe and fawn. josie is depressed and self-harms as a way to feel alive. from the wounds in her arms, plants begin to sprout, and she realizes she has found what she desires and needs go no further. ventress has cancer, and is found at the core of the infection, where she becomes a living tumor.
the climax: a non-verbal culmination of the sheer terror of being replaced by something that is made from us, but not us. the grueling process of being annihilated. lena heroically reverses her fate and survives by lasering the tumor, but she is forever changed. (i like to think fire worked to kill it because duplicating fire just makes... more fire)
theme: death is inescapable and transforms the identities of even the strongest of will, yet each act of destruction is in turn an act of creation. this transformation can be horrifying, it can be beautiful, it can be peaceful, it can be determined. nothing escapes annihilation, but nothing is ever truly annihilated.
PEACE
ps apocalypse now is a better comparison than the thing, because this is obv a heart of darkness journey. also, to the lighthouse, as loudly said like five times in dialogue.
psps altho thing is fair too, i mean body horror in general is about the terrifying nature of finding oneself being transformed into something else. one way to think of annihilation is that it takes body horror and applies it to an entire environment - plants, bears, dna, light.