“Annihilation” Author Raves About The Film

Amongst the most anticipated films on the way is “Ex Machina” writer/director Alex Garland’s new film “Annihilation,” an adaptation of Jeff Vandermeer’s intriguing novel.

Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson and Gina Rodriguez play four women sent into the mysterious ‘Area X,’ a portion of land in the United States that has been quarantined due to abnormal activity.

The quartet marks the twelfth expedition sent into Area X, all the previous ones have died or disappeared. Oscar Isaac also stars in the film which is still in post-production and Vandermeer revealed recently on The Watch podcast that he’d seen am early version of the film and it’s quite different to the novel:

“The first thing I realized is that even though Alex Garland says he’s not an auteur, he is an auteur. So my expectation was to not have anything to do with the movie and that’s the actual fact.

He wrote the script and he was kind enough to keep me in the loop during every part of the process, but that wasn’t for me to put my two cents in, basically. It was just so I would know what was going on.

It’s actually more surreal than the novel. There are a couple places where I was like, ‘I might need an anchor here.’ The ending is so mind-blowing and in some ways different from the book that it seems to be the kind of ending that, like 2001 or something like that, people will be talking about around the watercooler for years… Visually, it’s amazing. I must say that and that’s all I probably should say.”

Separately he’s since labelled the film “mind-blowing, surreal, extremely beautiful, extremely horrific, and tense”. At last report, Paramount had this scheduled for sometime in early 2018, but some are still holding out hope it might make it for year’s end.

Source: “Annihilation” Author Raves About The Film – Dark Horizons