Alex Garland is one of, if not the, definitive cinematic sci-fi auteurs of the modern era. He wrote the screenplays for 28 Days Later, Never Let Me Go and Dredd (a surprisingly good Judge Dredd movie that was unfairly overlooked in 2012) and wrote and directed Ex Machina and Annihilation, both of which are awesome and widely acknowledged as such.
Now, he’s turned auteur TV creator, following in the footsteps of Paulo Sorrentino (The Young Pope and The New Pope) by writing and directing every single episode (which will be eight in total, at least for Season One) of his TV show Devs. It’s a big commitment, but results in one-of-a-kind TV.
If you’re into sci-fi, and into Garland (and the latter kind of follows the former naturally), you’ll be into Devs. Garland borrows his visual aesthetic from Annihilation – overly vibrant, almost ‘technicolor-throwback’ colours, a forest setting housing a near-future set of gizmos – and applies it to the story of a Big Tech company, based just outside of San Francisco, which is developing something Very Big Indeed. To motor the plot, there’s a murder mystery, or at least a version of one: we see the murder committed in the first episode, but the meaning of the murder is the mystery.
Everything’s pretty great – including Nick Offerman as our Jack Dorsey / Elon Musk stand-in – with the exception of the lead performance of Sonoya Mizano, a model and dancer (she was the double of Natalie Portman in Annihilation), whose inexperience shows. It doesn’t derail the ship, however, and, frankly, by the end of ep two, I’d adjusted for it and moved on. This is a big, bold, seemingly uncompromised vision. Go in.