The Lobster Dance

Annihilation! Annihilation! Annihilation!

Back in 2015, I reviewed The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. In the first novel, the twelfth expedition to Area X, which has been cut off from the rest of the continent for 30 years, is lead by a five-woman team: the biologist, the anthropologist, the surveyor, the psychologist, and the linguist. Their mission: avoid contamination and survey the mysterious area from the lighthouse to the camp to the tunnel. Or is it a tower?

Alex Garland will be directing the film adaption.

I was first excited about the film until I saw that instead of casting the Biologist as a multiracial Asian woman, as she is in the book, Garland cast Natalie Portman. Additionally, Jennifer Jason Leigh was cast as the Psychologist, who is part Native American and part white.

Check out this interview with author Jeff Vandermeer (which may be a hidden dig at the casting):

Earlier this week, we got our first look at director Alex Garland’s adaptation of your novel Annihilation. What was that like to watch?

It’s very surreal and weird, this whole experience, and I’m still processing it. In a context where as the writer of the book, I don’t have any control over any aspect of the movie! On one level, I’m thankful it means more people will read the novels, which are very personal to me. I don’t think there’s as much of an emphasis on environmental themes in the movie, but at the same time, because a percentage of royalties from Annihilation book sales go toward environmental causes, the movie still helps that cause.

I appreciate Garland’s aptness for the visionary and gritty. It is truly an intense and epic film that will leave filmgoers feeling drained by the end, while at the same time readers of the novels have to think of the movie as an alt-Area X, alt-Southern Reach experience. I can’t deny I mourn some of those changes on a very deep level. Also, it is very difficult to experience a film when you’ve visited the set. I have very fond memories of meeting, for example, Tessa Thompson and Gina Rodriguez, and then seeing them active on Twitter about the movie. So that all forms an overlay as well, which I hadn’t expected.

Sigh. You had one job, Hollywood.

More reading:

“Natalie Portman’s Character in New Film ‘Annihilation’ Was Originally of Asian Descent”

“A while ago, it was announced that Natalie Portman would be playing the Biologist….”