The film Annihilation (2018), starring Natalie Portman, is much more than a foray into sci-fi horror. It is, in essence, a visual representation of the inevitable clash between human nature and stark reality. In a world where we are constantly bombarded by narratives that try to distort facts to fit ideological molds — whether left or right — Lena’s (Portman) trajectory at the center of the “Brilho” (an extraterrestrial entity that distorts everything it touches) offers a lesson in survival for contemporary Man who refuses to be just another “implanted population” of other people’s ideas.
The modern left today lives immersed in an unrealism that tries to treat society as a social engineering laboratory. There is a dangerous belief that reality can be “regulated” in every detail and “planned” from a center of benevolent power, ignoring the organic complexity of the world. In the film, this mentality is mirrored in the organization that tries to contain Brilho: you send experts with strict protocols, hoping that reality will submit to bureaucratic logic and the desire of social engineers.
However, reality — like the biological phenomenon in the film — is refractory and totally indifferent to plans. When facts do not reconcile with ideology, the left chooses (always!) to ignore the facts or try to silence them, which inevitably leads to stagnation or systemic collapse. Trying to impose a utopian model on a system that is constantly changing is a form of intellectual arrogance that ends in annihilation (pun intended).
Life, in its most brutal form, does not accept being contained by Excel spreadsheets or by visions of a perfect world that never existed, nor will ever exist.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, today’s conservatism (largely a reaction to the madness you see on the streets and on TV) struggles with crippling nostalgia. There is a latent desire to return to the “good old times” that, in truth, never existed in the way they are romanticized. It is the Ship of Theseus fallacy taken to its political limit: it is believed that one can maintain the same social and identity structure by changing all the planks and ignoring the wear and tear of time, keeping an original spirit intact and untouchable. In Natalie Portman’s Brilliance this vision is severely punished. Those who try to remain “pure” and unchanging are the first to lose their sanity and physical integrity.
The world changes, cells divide and identity evolves irreversibly. Conservatism that only looks backwards, trying to freeze time through a narrative of constant loss, becomes as dysfunctional as utopian planning. It is a childish refusal to accept that reality requires movement and that the preservation of something alive requires, paradoxically, the acceptance of its transformation. Anyone who clings too tightly to the past ends up being crushed by the weight of the present.
To this scenario of ideological polarization is added a new and equally corrosive factor: the intellectual laziness of the new generation — with retention times reduced to seconds and educated under principles that simple participation is already worth a reward. Accustomed to observing reality through screens, algorithms and comfort filters, many young people have lost their survival instinct and, even more seriously, their individual agency. They are willing to let the world change around them without any effort of active adaptation, or to accept that the State plans every detail of their lives in exchange for false security, without even questioning the most basic thing: what the cost is (literally, who pays?) for the service.
In the film, this passivity and lack of determination would be an immediate death sentence in the face of Brilho’s transformative force. Or, to put it another way, the youngest are the first to be annihilated.
Survival (spoiler!) of Lena is not the result of luck or external intervention, but of her ability to act as Adam Smith’s “Impartial Spectator”. She looks at the facts of her own life — including her mistakes, her betrayals, and her wounds — without the filter of self-pity or ideological excuse. She doesn’t wait for a planner to save her, nor does she cry for a past that she herself helped to destroy. She plays with the cards she has.
This is true individual agency: the courage to look into the abyss of reality and decide that while we cannot control the forces that shape us, we can control the way we reconstruct ourselves to inhabit them. The laziness of those who wait for reality to adapt to them is the quickest path to obsolescence.
The film’s ending, often interpreted as unsettling or scary, is actually a sign of realistic hope. The final “hybrid” beings have an opportunity for happiness that the original humans, trapped in vicious cycles of lies, guilt and dogma, did not possess. By accepting the mutation, by accepting that reality won and that they changed with it, they found a peace that is forbidden to ideologues and the lazy.
In society, everything starts with the individual. Happiness and sanity in a collapsing world depend on the ability to shatter our old illusions—whether the planned utopias of the left or the immobile nostalgias of the right—and embrace the honesty of who we are now. But to do this you need will. Reality cannot be avoided, nor can it be controlled by decrees or nostalgia. It can and must be lived with the dignity of someone who chooses factual truth over the comfort of lies, adapting to survive with the brilliance of someone who finally sees things as they are.
The reality, simply, is.
Leave a Reply