The history of sci-fi film is a history of making the impossible possible, and one of the best examples of this was released eight years ago today. Sci-fi is all about distant worlds, faraway futures, and incomprehensible scientific advancements. While it is easy to write concepts like this, it is much harder to capture them on film. This is why many of the best sci-fi films are massive achievements, as they managed to convince viewers that these dreams can be a reality.
Sci-fi has become one of the most used genres in popular film, with major franchises like the MCU, the DCU, Star Wars, and Avatar belonging to it. While these films use sci-fi to tell exciting stories, few movies are actually interested in the science more than the fiction. Movies that attempt to actually explain fictional phenomenon can be incredibly interesting, as was the case here.
Alex Garland’s Annihilation Was Released Eight Years Ago
Image courtesy of Skydance.
2018’s Annihilation is one of the most beloved sci-fi movies of the 2010s, and it is still an achievement to this day. The film is based on the first entry in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, which follows a government organization known as Southern Reach that investigates a quarantined zone known as Area X. Area X has been reclaimed by nature, with it taking over any vestiges of human civilization and transforming everything into natural phenomena. Humans who go into Area X are subject to strange changes, with many dying, becoming diseased, or turning on each other.
The Southern Reach Trilogy is a cosmic horror sci-fi story, with it taking inspiration from many of the most iconic entries in the canon. Cosmic horror is a notoriously difficult subgenre to adapt into visual media, as it requires a materialization of incomprehensible horrors. Thus, it seemed incredibly difficult to adapt a story like Annihilation without stripping it of what made it so fascinating. However, Alex Garland believed that he was up to the task.
Garland was hired to write and direct Annihilation in late 2014, and he decided to intentionally take things in a different direction than the books. First, Garland decided not to read the sequels, as he didn’t want to be influenced by them. Second, Garland tried not to reference the book while writing, basing it on his memory in order to give the film a dream-like feel. So, this allowed him to make some major changes to the series’ world, such as renaming Area X “The Shimmer” and giving it a definitive extraterrestrial origin rather than the more ambiguous explanation in the book.
Annihilation wasn’t a box office success, with it only making $43.1 million against a budget of $55 million. However, the movie was a big critical success. The film currently holds 88% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 67% audience score, proving that it was a bit more divisive with general audiences. It is considered to be one of the best movies of 2018 and one of Alex Garland’s best films.
Will Annihilation Ever Get A Sequel?
Since the Annihilation book is the first entry in a trilogy, many fans are still wondering if the movie will ever get a sequel. The second and third books in the Southern Reach Trilogy are titled Authority and Acceptance, respectively, and they could make great movies as well. However, it doesn’t seem like the film trilogy will ever be finished.
Alex Garland previously stated that he isn’t interested in doing a sequel to Annihilation, and this isn’t surprising (via IndieWire). Alex Garland intentionally avoided the Southern Reach sequels when developing his film, so it would be strange for him to jump to the sequels that he initially wasn’t interested in. Garland’s changes to the first book mean that the sequels will have to be changed even further, making it a strange adaptational choice.
On top of that, studios probably wouldn’t be interested in following up on Annihilation. The film’s box office failure means that Paramount Pictures probably wouldn’t financially back another entry in the series, as it wouldn’t be seen as a safe investment. While the movie would undoubtedly be good, this usually isn’t enough to justify a studio dumping millions of dollars into a project.
So, Annihilation seems like a one-off. While this may be sad for fans of the book series, this is undoubtedly the best option. Annihilation is a fantastic stand-alone movie, and Paramount shouldn’t risk tainting it with an unnecessary sequel movie.
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