![]() We didn't have Mario Galaxy and Rocket League on our 'meets-meets' bingo cards, but colour us intrigued all the same. Unless, of course, some streaming juggernaut can come to the rescue.Did you enjoy peacefully navigating the spherical planets of Super Mario Galaxy? Then you might just love turning them into a battleground in Aniquilation, which releases in the Switch eShop on 27th July.įar from relaxing galaxy-hopping, the first game for Colombian developer R-Next promises to be a high-octane spacecraft-based shooter, throwing players onto three-dimensional battlefields without a plumber in sight.Īs you can see from the PC trailer above, the frantic shooting and spacecraft movement creates a frenetic style of gameplay with a terraforming focus in which anything can be turned into a weapon.Īside from this standardised story mode, Aniquilation also contains some fun-looking couch co-op missions such as Defend the Base and Contagion, with the potential to ignite a new generation of sibling rivalries as you crash, smash and shoot your way through the onslaught of ships.Īlternative game modes may also pique the interest of Rocket League fans, with a football-based feature allowing players the chance to have a kick-about on the surface of their planet environment. The tragedy is that this promising, intriguing film, which ought to have been the first instalment from VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy – is unlikely to spawn a sequel. The tragedy here is not that Annihilation has gone straight to Netflix. As with Portman's Jackie, her inner-turmoil is masked by permafrost.īarring the occasional not-so-special effect, the tech specs – including Rob Hardy’s cinematography, Barney Pilling’s appositely discombobulating cuts, and Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s freaky score – are appealing. This is no ordinary gender-swapped rescue mission: her journey is motivated as much by guilt and obligation as it is by love. Lena, too, is a complicated heroine with complicated feelings about her husband. The more familiar aspects of Annihilation are enlivened by the entirely female dynamic, who seldom conform to simplistic group archetypes. No one, bar Kane, has even returned from this trippy location, where nothing is certain, even at a basic cellular level. Female dynamicĪlmost immediately, the group begin to suffer from gaps in memory and lose all track of time. Flashbacks reveal that her husband, Kane (Isaacs) returned from a military mission into a place known as “the shimmer” or “Area X”, a site that was hit by a meteor.ĭetermined to find out what happened to Kane – who has no recollection of coming home and who promptly falls into a coma – Lena teams up with Dr Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a physicist (Thompson), a geologist (Novotny) and a paramedic (Rodriguez), and ventures into Area X. Lena (Portman, in yet another interesting career move) is a cellular biologist and former soldier who is debriefed about a mysterious mission. The rest of the film is pretty terrific, if a little derivative of Tarkovsky's Stalker. This may be a great pity, but truth be told, the film’s slightly ropey CG aurora borealis effects and extra-terrestrial doodles could only have looked ropier on a larger screen. With a similar damp fizzle, Annihilation opened to a paltry $11 million in the US on February 23rd. ![]() ![]() ![]() In the blue corner, David Ellison, the producer of not-so-fine films Geostorm and Terminator: Genysis, complained that Annihilation was "too intellectual" and wanted to soften Portman's character.įor all the ecstatic reviews (and an Oscar for director of photography Roger Deakins), the producers of Blade Runner 2049 lost an estimated $80 million on the sci-fi sequel. In the red corner, Scott Rudin, the producer of such fine films as The Social Network and Lady Bird, stood over Garland's right to a "final cut".Īnnihilation: another interesting career move for Natalie Portman A rift soon developed between Annihilation's producers. The film's troubled pre-release history began when the studio saw an early cut of the film and panicked. It has received rave notices in the US on its limited theatrical release.īut here, as with the much-maligned Cloverfield Paradox, it was dumped by its distributor Paramount, and will go straight to Netflix. It's based on the Nebula Award winning novel by Jeff VanderMeer. In case you've missed the headlines, this whip-smart science-fiction film comes with a starry cast and writer-director Alex Garland ( 28 Days Later, Never Let Me Go, Dredd) attached. There has been so much kerfuffle around Annihilation, the drama has, in recent months, threatened to spill over into, well, actual annihilation.
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