‘Annihilation’ Movie Featurette with Natalie Portman and Gina Rodriguez

Paramount Pictures has released a brief featurette with Natalie Portman and Gina Rodriguez discussing the science fiction thriller, Annihilation. The minute and a half video includes new scenes and focuses on the mutations the characters encounter.

Annihilation was directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina, 28 Days Later) and is based on Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach Trilogy.” Garland also adapted VanderMeer’s work for the screen. Scott Rudin, Andrew MacDonald, Allon Reich, and Eli Bush served as producers.

In addition to Natalie Portman (Black Swan, Jackie) and Gina Rodriguez (Jane the Virgin, Deepwater Horizon), the cast of the much-anticipated drama includes Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny, and Oscar Isaac.

Paramount Pictures is targeting a February 23, 2018 theatrical release.

The Plot: Lena, a biologist and former soldier, joins a mission to uncover what happened to her husband inside Area X – a sinister and mysterious phenomenon that is expanding across the American coastline. Once inside, the expedition discovers a world of mutated landscape and creatures, as dangerous as it is beautiful, that threatens both their lives and their sanity.

A More Detailed Description of Jeff VanderMeer’s Book: “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.” (Per FSG Originals)

Annihilation New Video
Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Tuva Novotny, Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh in ‘Annihilation’ from Paramount Pictures and Skydance.