A movie with Natalie Portman on Netflix will make you think and touch your soul
Destruction is a film by Alex Garland based on the book of the same name by Jeff Vandermeer. Released in 2018, the film appears to be a traditional sci-fi story about an incandescent meteorite that falls to Earth and crashes into a lighthouse. At the site of the disaster, nature undergoes catastrophic changes, and American scientists call the site of the accident a “glow”.
At the heart of the story is Kane (Oscar Isaac), a soldier sent on a secret mission to the Shining. His wife Lena (Natalie Portman) didn’t know where he was sent. Kane was missing for 12 months before returning home and suffering side effects such as bleeding and seizures.
Kane falls into a coma and asks Lena, a biologist, to explain what happened to her husband. So she volunteers to go on an expedition to the Shining to investigate what could have caused the disappearance of Kane’s other companions and his illness. It is important to emphasize that when the husband returns, he will not look the same. He looks like a person deprived of life and emotions. It was as if something had taken over his body, or as if an identical clone of Kane had returned to his place. Together with a team of scientists from other fields, he enters the center of an alien aberration.
As Lena and the others explore the contaminated site, they are faced with a changed nature, as if the radiation has altered the DNA of plants and animals, making everything harmful and deadly. During the expedition, the audience also has access to Lena’s memories with flashbacks that explain her marriage and the unexpected: her infidelity.
Although it appears to be exactly what it is, “destruction” is only a metaphor. The true story told in the film is about dealing with cancer. In the allegory, the earth has cancer. The reality behind the story is that Kane is facing cancer, and later Lena. There are several references to the disease in the story, including one of the characters who accompanies Lena on the expedition suffering from the disease. But the truth is that Alex Garland wanted to show us in a poetic, anthological and intellectual way how to deal with cancer. It shines like a diseased cell that multiplies and begins to pollute the cells around it, turning them into aberrations, distorting them. And worst of all, it makes them turn against the body.
“Destroy” is self-destruction. About an organism that destroys itself after being affected by cancer. In one scene, a character tells Lena of Kane, “It’s hard to walk into the limelight and come out intact.” Then the hero answers: “He [Kane] It didn’t come out intact.” People who have managed to survive cancer do not come out the same. The film follows the stages of the disease until its terminal stage, when a person loses his mind, loses himself and no longer knows who he is. Just like Kane when he comes home looking nothing like the person Lena married.
There are two ways to look at “Destroy.” One of them views it as generic and bland science fiction. The second is to see it through the prism of allegory, and then everything makes more sense and the audience sees how the movie is actually underrated. “Devastation” is an intense and profound journey through the stages of the second disease that kills the most in the world, causing about 10 million deaths every year, according to the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). A powerful, dense and complex film that deserves much more recognition than it gets.
title: Destruction
Direction: Alex Garland
Year: 2018 year
Gender: Sci-Fi/Drama
Note: 9/10
