Natalie Portman Enters the Unknown In Amazing Trailer For ‘Annihilation’ [Watch]

Over the course of 2014, like a creeping virus, the three novels of Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach” Trilogy, beginning with “Annihilation,” invaded bookstores one after the other. These profoundly unsettling and thought-provoking books portrayed a part of the United States permanently altered by a possibly extraterrestrial organic intelligence and subsequently sealed off by the Army. Eschewing the more familiar tropes of modern sci-fi, the books reach back to the weird fiction of Lovecraft and others to create a monster terrifying in how utterly unlike humanity it is, whose inconceivable difference threatens to distort everything around and inside of the protagonist. The first book depicts an all female scientific expedition into the little understood region, including Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, and Tessa Thompson, while Oscar Isaac plays Natalie Portman’s lost husband.

There’s a litany of reasons that the first book, “Annihilation,” will be difficult to bring to the screen, but Alex Garland is the perfect person for the job. Garland has succeeded both as a novelist and in his directorial debut, 2015’s excellent “Ex-Machina.”

Jeff VanderMeer has seen a cut and his words should produce anticipation for any fans of big, weird filmmaking: “It’s actually more surreal than the novel….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…it’s mind-blowing, surreal, extremely beautiful, extremely horrific, and it was so tense that our bodies felt sore and beat-up afterwards.”

The end of the book is incredibly surreal, so these are not words to be taken lightly. A first trailer for Garland’s movie has dropped, courtesy of Paramount, and you can take a look at it above and below. “Annihilation” will be released February 23, 2018 by Paramount.