"I need to know what's inside," Natalie Portman says toward the end of the first trailer for Annihilation, the forthcoming adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's 2014 surprise-hit sci-fi novel. Anybody's who read VanderMeer's book—about a group of female scientists who venture into a mysterious wilderness named Area X—can relate to that fervent curiosity: A slim, perfectly paced, deeply imaginative little shocker, Annihilation is the kind of novel that's not so much hard to put down as it is impossible to turn off, full of metaphysical-graffiti imagery and tightly executed reveals that stay with you long afterward. And it makes you feel sorry for the poor sucker tasked with somehow making it all work on the big screen.
As it turns out, that job falls to Oscar-nominated Ex Machina writer-director Alex Garland, who hired an ace cast—including Portman, Gina Rodriguez, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tessa Thompson—and placed them in the middle of Annihilation's expansive, seemingly elastic eco-wonderland, full of oozing-rainbow borders, slightly off-looking critters, and plant-formed bodies (it's a little bit Swamp Thing, a little bit Hipgnosis). As with VanderMeer's book, the focus here is on Portman's character, a biologist trying to understand what happened to her husband (Oscar Isaac) after he returned from his own trip deep into Area X. It's a task that involves gunplay, deception, and a descent into a strange tower where … well, we book readers won't spoil that for the rest of you. Instead, we'll all get absorbed into the world of Annihilation together when the movie opens in February.
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