Annihilation starts off grand and cosmic: a meteor flies through space and crashes into Earth.  Then we stay cosmic but more grounded - we’re in the biology class of Lena (Nathalie Portman), teaching med students about the basic cellular nature of life.  We gather that Lena’s husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) is a soldier, and is presumed dead after being missing for a year.  But as she moves about her bedroom back at home, repainting the walls, he appears silently in the doorway.  He has returned, but also not: Kane can’t remember where he’s been, or how he got home, and then proceeds to begin coughing up blood.  Their ambulance is intercepted by armed soldiers, and Lena is sedated; when she awakens, a woman named Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) informs her of double horrors - her husband is seriously ill, and was involved in a mission to explore an uncanny irruption in a sparsely populated, swampy region of the U.S. that’s being termed “the shimmer.”

For a big budget war movie, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk runs against the expected grain in ways large and small.  It’s perhaps obsessively interested in communicating the scale of a world war, in terms of distance, multitudes, and time, but it accomplishes this through spareness rather than any piling on.  Two great armies face each other: the conquering Germans and the defeated English, 400,000 of whom have been driven to European continent’s edge at the beginning of World War II, gathered in a small defensive pocket around the French city of Dunkirk.  Through the course of the film, though, we only ever see the faces and bodies of Allied soldiers, never their German enemies, except indirectly, as marauding aircraft or through the explosion of artillery shells.  And we see the vast numbers of Allied troops as much in the empty and exposed spaces of their positions as in their actual presence; they are many, yet they are utterly vulnerable at the French shore, literally standing in lines to the sea in one of the film’s memorable early scenes.

Life combines a traditional sci-fi warning tale about the dangers of toying with forces humankind doesn’t understand with the lesser-known storyline of characters making catastrophically dumb choices, resulting in what I like to call a “double-trouble” morality tale.  These two narratives can be complementary, but in Life they exist in some tension — the high moral purpose of the first (this is a movie with a BIG IDEA that you should take seriously) is somewhat at odds with the more popcorn flick thrill of watching a close-knit team get picked off by a baddie.  The film’s heart is in the harum-scarum direction, which means its attempts at seriousness end up feeling a little silly and pretentious.