Paramount Pictures has announced that Alex Garland’s (Ex Machina director) next project, Annihilation, will be hitting cinemas on February 23, 2018.
Alex Garland was already well known in both cinema and writing circles before he released his jaw-dropping directorial debut film, Ex Machina. On a personal note, it was one of my top five movies of 2015. It demonstrated that Alex Garland was not just a great scriptwriter, but also a formidable director and certainly one to watch.
He’s been hard at work adapting Jeff VanderMeer’s sci-fi novel Annihilation, which is the first in a series of three known as the Southern Reach trilogy. Now, Paramount Pictures has slated the movie of a February 23, 2018 release, which means that it’ll be coming out in the same month as Paramount’s other big 2018 movie, Cloverfield 3, previously known as God Particle.
Before directing Ex Machina, Alex Garland wrote the scripts for 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd and Never Let Me Go. He also served as Executive Producer on 28 Weeks Later. He’s also written two novels, The Beach – which was later adapted for the big screen by Danny Boyle – and The Tesseract. It’s pretty obvious that he’s a multi-talented individual.
Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson in Ex Machina
Annihilation stars Natalie Portman as the film’s lead: a biologist who goes on an expedition in a mysterious place only known as Area X. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, and Tessa Thompson will make up the rest of Portman’s team in this upcoming sci-fi/horror picture. Ex Machina alum, Oscar Isaac, will be playing the biologist’s husband.
After having seen the slightly disappointing and thoroughly unoriginal Alien: Covenant, I’m hoping that Garland can demonstrate the abundance of skill he did with Ex Machina and offer us something genuinely different within the sci-fi/horror genre. I for one haven’t read VanderMeer’s novels, but they certainly sound interesting and I’ll be picking them up now and make sure that I’ve finished them all before the first film comes out. It certainly sounds like Paramount would like to turn this into a franchise, and in Garland they’ve chosen one of the most fascinating filmmakers working today to helm this project.
Annihilation will be in cinemas on February 23, 2018.
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