Alex Garland’s Annihilation Adaptation Set for February 23, 2018

Alex Garland’s Annihilation adaptation set for February 23, 2018

Following yesterday’s Pacific Rim Uprising release date change from February 23 to March 23, 2018, Paramount Pictures has slated the release for director Alex Garland’s Annihilation adaptation for February 23, 2018. The futuristic gothic horror adaptation, based on the first part of novelist Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” trilogy, stars Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, and Oscar Isaac, who is reteaming with Garland after Ex Machina.

Annihilation, first published in 2014, is officially described as follows:

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer.

This is the twelfth expedition.

Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them, and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another, that change everything.

Paramount Pictures and producer Scott Rudin (also a producer on Ex Machina) acquired the movie rights to the entire 2014 trilogy. Annihilation, published in February 2014, was followed by Authority in May 2014 and Acceptance in September 2014.

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