After more than a
decade of writing for others, Alex Garland made his directorial debut last year
with the small scale but full of big ideas sci-fi film Ex Machina. For his auspicious
debut, the artist received an Oscar nomination (his first) for best original
screenplay, and saw the film win the award for visual effects.
For his next project,
the British filmmaker is adapting Annihilation, a Jeff Vandermeer environmental
sci-fi thriller novel, which follows the twelfth
expedition to Area X, a patch of land in the U.S. that the government has secretly
quarantined due to certain anomalies. The team's mission is to map the terrain,
record their findings, and above all survive the area. Consisting of an anthropologist, a surveyor, a
psychologist, the de facto leader, and a biologist who acts as the story
narrator, the group arrives at Area X expecting the unexpected and the
mysterious land delivers. Upon arriving at Area X, the four women discover a
massive topographic anomaly and life forms that defy any scientific
understanding, but it is the surprises that come across the border with them,
and the secrets they keep from each other that will change everything. Area X is dangerous place. The first expedition
returned with reports of a pristine landscape, the second ended in
mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on each
another, the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their
former selves, and within weeks, all died of cancer.
For the film, Garland assembled an astonishing array
of talent that includes Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina
Rodriguez, and his Ex Machina star Oscar Isaac.
With production ending soon, cast members and cinematographer
Rob Hardy ("Ex Machina") have shared some hauntingly beautiful
pictures taken on the set of the highly anticipated film, which comes out sometime in 2017.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment