New 'Annihilation' Trailer Looks a Lot Like 'Alien: Covenant'
Yet somehow, it also looks way better.
Natalie Portman’s new sci-fi film, Annihilation is starting to look more and more like Alien: Covenant, especially with its terrifying exploration of how alien influences trigger some horrifying evolution. Except instead of a Xenomorph, we get some kind of werewolf and lots of pretty flowers.
On Saturday, Paramount released a new TV spot for Annihilation called “Evolution.” The new scenes included offer more details about the sci-fi craziness happening inside the disaster zone that Portman and her fellow crew investigate.
In Annihilation, Portman plays a biologist and former soldier named Lena that’s investigating Area X, a dangerous zone surrounding the crash site of a meteor from space. Something called “The Shimmer” surrounds it, continuously expanding across the American coastline and doing something to everything that passes through. Anyone that goes inside, including Lena’s husband, disappears. This new trailer has lifted the veil to let us know exactly what’s going on inside the Shimmer.
A group of five goes in, but how many will make it out?
Tons of creepy things happen as Lena and her crew investigate various mutations. Flowers have more complex patterns, deer have flowers growing on their antlers, frozen water takes the form of trees, and flower patches take the form of humanoid figures — yeah lots of creepy stuff with flowers.
“Group of armed scientists wandering about the strange wilderness” is almost shot-for-shot what we get in Alien: Covenant, even more so when this team realizes they’re some kind of monster out there and there’s some kind of contagion that begins infecting them.
“Something here is making giant waves in the gene pool,” Lena says, before some kind of werewolf-looking thing attacks everyone.
Natalie Portman plays Lena in 'Annihilation'.
Before long, we learn that whatever is infecting the gene pool has infected Lena, but that’s where things get even weirder. “It’s not destroying,” she explains. “It’s making something new.”
This focus on a creating “something new” through evolution sounds just like the genetically perfect monster the android David created in Covenant.
Is the horrifying monster presented in this trailer just another version of that classic sci-fi monster, or is The Shimmer hiding something even worse?
Annihilation will be released February 23, 2018.
Check out this featurette for more information about The Shimmer.
