Annihilation deals in bountiful hallucinogenic imagery, but the image from Alex Garland's sci-fi horror that may prove most remarkable to audiences is one that really ought to be mundane: a poster featuring the film's five female leads. It's an uncommon setup, and not just for a generously budgeted studio picture.

Annihilation deals in bountiful hallucinogenic imagery, but the image from Alex Garland's sci-fi horror that may prove most remarkable to audiences is one that really ought to be mundane: a poster featuring the film's five female leads. Female representation in Hollywood still lags far behind --women made up only 34 percent of speaking characters in top-grossing films last year, while the number of female leads has, in fact, recently fallen--but Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez, and Tuva Novotny have the reins of this $55 million Paramount project, while Oscar Isaac, the film's most significant male character, takes the supporting role of imperilled love interest to a take-action female hero. It's an uncommon setup, and not just for a generously budgeted studio picture. But it's less unusual when you narrow the focus to science fiction, where women have recently been taking the lead on-screen. Garland's sophomore effort as writer-director follows his own Ex Machina, plus such sizable productions as Arrival, Gravity, 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Cloverfield Paradox, Colossal, Okja, and The Shape of Water, in putting a woman or women at the forefront of a science-fiction narrative.

FORTY years ago, at the height of the race between the United States and the Soviet Union to lay claim to the cosmos, a much-anticipated science-fiction movie made its debut, and sci-fi was never the same again. Kids whose parents dragged them along to the theater were alternately bemused, disturbed and mesmerized. We knew we'd seen a grown-up movie, even if we couldn't completely make sense of it all. We were being initiated into a cultural dialogue that was, after all, about our future. The movie, of course, was Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," and many critics and much of the public instantly recognized it as a landmark. It was, wrote L.A. Times film critic Charles Champlin, "the picture that science-fiction fans of every age and in every corner of the world have prayed (sometimes forlornly) that the industry might some day give them."