I thought Ex Machina was (although flawed) an excellent movie, Annihilation was just crap though. Apart from the outfits, there was nothing even remotely military about any of them, the whole thing just didn't know where it was going or why, it was a huge confused mess. It probably would have made a good TV episode in an anthology show, but just not enough there to make a decent film. It put me in mind of Arrival (easily the worst sci-fi movie of recent times), low-brow junk masquerading as high-brow gold. Both were designed from the ground up to make stupid people think they are really smart. If a film is advertised as 'highly intelligent' they should at least be moderately intelligent, but this doesn't even come close. The fact the ending is somewhat ambiguous and there are several different theories about it doesn't mean the film is cleaver, it just means the ending has more than one interpretation. I'm not saying films should spoon feed you all the answers, in fact, I hate when that happens, It's great being able to contemplate a movie and it's meanings after the fact, the problem here is it gives you so little of worth to actually think about.