Science fiction knows the future is female
NATALIE PORTMAN’S NEW MOVIE WAS SHOT NEARLY two years ago, but it couldn’t be coming out at a better time. “It’s this very simple but radical thing: five female central roles,” she says. “It should be totally normal. But it’s actually completely remarkable.”
The film is Annihilation, an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 sci-fi novel by the same name, the first in his best-selling Southern Reach trilogy. In the film, biologist Lena (Portman) is troubled when her husband (Oscar Isaac) returns from a top-secret mission not quite himself. Lena travels into the same territory her husband somehow survived—a contaminated zone known as Area X that’s surrounded by a mysterious haze—with
