A little more than six months ago an extended trailer for Alex Garland‘s Annihilation was shown at Cinemacon. It wowed a lot of journos (myself among them) and exhibs. I’d also been reading online that at the very least it has an absolutely killer ending.

But I have to be honest and say that the trailer that popped this morning [below] isn’t as grabby or intriguing as the Cinemacon reel. My reaction last March was “wow, okay…that was something.” My reaction to today’s trailer is “uhhm, okay, yeah…why does this seem less intriguing?”

It costars Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac, David Gyasi and Sonoya Mizuno.

From a 7.14.15 Gizmodo interview with Garland, posted by Charlie Jane Anders:

Garland: “What I’d say is, that I’ve worked on different kinds of adaptations in the past. One of them was called Never Let Me Go, which was based on a book by Kazuo Ishiguro. Relatively speaking, what that film did was it kind of held up a mirror to the book. It was a slightly distorting mirror, in some respects, but basically it’s holding up a mirror…a sort of movie mirror, I guess.”

“The movie of Annihilation, Gardland says, is “not doing that. This is not tightly adhering to the beats of the novel in the same way. It’s a looser adaptation, although the basic precepts are still there.

“Let me put it this way: If you saw the film, you’d know what it was based on. I can say that. But that’s presumptuous of me…if I get to make the film, and you saw the film, and you’d read the book, you’d say, ‘This is based on Annihilation.’ So it’s not that loose.” But it’s not as close a copy as Never Let Me Go.”