I found myself wanting more time with them without a looming horror show. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) have their own reasons for going on an apparent suicide mission.Īs they journey into the Shimmer, which is slowly consuming land, the women talk about their careers, their work, and try to connect. ![]() We don’t really know her true motives, and fellow travelers Anya ( Gina Rodriguez), Cass (Tuva Novotny), Josie (Tessa Thompson), and Dr. Lena’s mission there is one of truth and redemption, but Portman plays her with appropriate detachment. After a clunky bit of table-setting that could have been trimmed back, we finally get to Area X. He was sent into Area X on a secret mission and feared dead, but suddenly returns home - altered. Natalie Portman plays Lena, a biologist and former soldier who is grieving the loss of her husband, Kane (Oscar Isaac). The film uses VanderMeer’s spectral setting to get in its characters’ heads. That’s about where the similarities to the book end. In Alex Garland’s adaptation of Annihilation, we still get to explore Area X, a quarantined area of a land besieged by mysterious environmental changes. This is how it tendrils into your dreams. ![]() He gives them a shape but lets the reader fill in the rest. He never mentions the names of the four scientists who travel into Area X he doesn’t really describe the otherworldly creatures they encounter. Still, it sucks that the price for the rest of us is not seeing Annihilation in the cinema.In his 2014 book Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer created a world that is thoroughly immersive, vivid, and dread-laden without naming or describing his characters. As an exploratory strategy, this deal makes sense for Paramount, allowing them to try Annihilation in the theatrical space with the no-doubt lucrative Netflix deal acting as a financial backstop, meaning they’re not as exposed as they would be otherwise. Garland’s first directorial offering, Ex Machina, was incredibly well received back in 2014, but even in that short span of time the focus on opening weekends has increased, and films like Ex Machina and Annihilation, which truck in heavy themes and complex concepts, do not skip as blithely over the language barrier as a blockbuster written in the language of explosions, so hoping international sales pick up the slack is a gamble (although note that Annihilation is still penciled in for theatrical release in China). With box office real estate increasingly contested and frequently ceded to either tentpole blockbusters or tailored arthouse fare, more niche movies, particularly challenging genre fare, struggle in a market that was formerly more receptive to such efforts. ![]() This is an interesting development, following on from the similar deal Netflix cut with New Line for their upcoming Samuel L. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, and Benedict Wong co-star. If the deal goes through the film will hit the ‘flix 17 days after its US premiere on February 23, 2018.īased on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation sees Natalie Portman’s biologist character volunteering to lead an exploratory mission into an environmental disaster zone after her husband (Oscar Isaac) goes missing, and things just get weird from there. Deadline is reporting that Annihilation, the highly anticipated (by us at least) science fiction thriller from director Alex Garland ( Ex Machina) is likely to skip theatrical distribution in most markets altogether, with Netflix currently negotiating with Paramount/Skydance to handle distro in all territories bar the US, Canada, and China.
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