Based on the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation (2018) starring Natalie Portman, is a sci-fi thriller that will screw with your mind in more ways than one. Warning: Spoilers below!

I haven't seen a film that's given me nightmares in a very long time, but Alex Garland's version of Annihilation had me waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats. It's disturbing, raw, aesthetically pleasing, and very intense.

But halfway through the film, it dawned on me that this mind-f**k of a movie is actually very similar to another movie: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009).

Bear with me on this, it will all make sense once I explain some major details.

Both movies follow the same plot, which is ultimate annihilation. In the animated film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the citizens of Swallow Falls are trying to outrun the growing food (literally, the food triples in size) before the food wipes them out.

Annihilation deals with an extraterrestrial, celestial-type being that mutates, evolves and grows into something "better," mutating and changing the biological makeup of everything it touches.

Both of these occurrences are not natural, which is a given.

In CWACM, a wacky scientist Flint Lockwood, accidentally launches his food processing machine, the "Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator", or FLDSMDFR for short, into the atmosphere, and food begins to fall from the sky, which seems like a miracle at first, until the food begins to mutate into life-size portions, including aggressive headless turkeys and man-eating gummy bears.

In Annihilation, a meteor crashes into a lighthouse, creating a "shimmer," an electromagnetic border that all within it begins to evolve and mutate, and no one except the protagonist, Lena, and her husband Kane, return from within the shimmer. Kane returned suddenly and without notice, noticeably ill and soon fell into a coma with multiple organ failures.

Inside of the shimmer, a mutated albino alligator attacks one of Lena's comrades. They discover that the alligator has teeth like those of a shark, leading Lena, a cellular biologist, to theorize that the alligator has been hybridized with a shark, an impossible feat for nature, except within the shimmer.

Both films tackle the idea of self-destruction.

Flint Lockwood hides inside of a trashcan, where he had previously thrown out all of his failed inventions, giving up on his attempt to save his home from the ever-mutating food and FLDSMDFR. Only through a motivational speech by his father is he able to throw on his lab coat again and save the town.

Lena, her husband Kane, and all of her comrades chose to go into the shimmer because they felt that they had nothing to lose. Lena had an affair when she thought her husband had been killed while on the secret mission, to which she believes Kane knew about the affair, which is why he went into the shimmer since he had nothing to lose.

Dr. Ventress, the psychologist and team leader that recruited all of the special teams that went into the shimmer, was dying of cancer and had no family, so she knew the risk of dying inside the shimmer.

The other members of the team all have a history that leaves them no choice but to disappear into the shimmer.

Both films have some really crazy stuff happening, all due to some kind of mutation.

CWACM has food falling from the sky, but from forcing the machine to produce excess food to please the town's sketchy mayor, the machine is now producing enormous-sized portions. At the end of the film, the town is threatened by a food storm, a spaghetti and meatball tornado, and a tidal wave of leftovers that will knock out the whole town.

While flying his flying car into the center of the food storm, Flint's plane is attacked by giant gummy bears that are ripping out the wires in the planes' wings.

Annihilation has an albino alligator cross-bred with a shark, a mutated bear-like creature that opens his mouth and belts out the screams of one of the dead team members, plants that are eerily human-like, and constant mutations among the team, like tattoos that form on their arms and their fingerprints "moving" on their skin.

The animated film is more of a kid-friendly version of the sci-fi thriller, not inducing as many panic attacks unless you have a fear of being crushed by giant food.

Both films were spectacular and I highly recommend watching them both and seeing how much they resemble one another.

Perhaps, these were the refractions the physicist was talking about.