Take a sci-fi trip with works of Civil War director Alex Garland
English writer and filmmaker Alex Garland’s latest film Civil War takes on American politics this weekend, with the provocative epic that imagines a war-torn United States as seen through the eyes of a team of photojournalists capturing the action.
While Civil War takes place in an imaginary near or alternate future that looks quite like reality, Garland is known for his searing sci-fi films that have captivated audiences in the past decade. But before he directed, he was a novelist and screenwriter who frequently collaborated with fellow Brit Danny Boyle.
His novel The Beach was adapted by John Hodge into the Boyle-directed thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio in 2000 (streaming on Disney+). His film career soon kicked off, writing the script for the boundarypushing zombie film 28 Days Later, also directed by Boyle, and starring Cillian Murphy, a project that would essentially jump-start the zombie craze of the aughts. Unfortunately,
28 Days Later is not currently streaming, so check out your local library or DVD sales for a disc.
Garland also wrote the scripts for the dystopian romantic tragedy Never Let Me Go in 2010, adapted from the book by Kazuo Ishiguro, directed by Mark Romanek (streaming on Disney+) and the 2012 script for Dredd, directed by Pete Travis and starring Karl Urban (stream it on Prime Video).
He made his directorial debut in 2015 with the artificial intelligence drama Ex Machina, starring Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson, which he also wrote. This sexy, mysterious sci-fi, focuses on a young programmer (Gleeson) who is hired by a mercurial tech mogul (Isaac) to administer a Turing test to his humanoid robot (Vikander) to surprising results. The film won the Academy Award for best visual effects, and the screenplay earned Garland a nomination for best original screenplay. Stream it on the CTV app.
Since then, he’s also directed the 2018 film Annihilation, which he adapted from Jeff VanderMeer’s hallucinatory sci-fi novel, about a group of four female scientists who enter a mysterious quarantine zone called The Shimmer. Starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez and Tessa Thompson, Annihilation is available to rent on all digital platforms.
His 2020 series Devs is set at a software company called Amaya, where a young engineer investigates the death of her boyfriend, who died on the first day of his job as a developer. The series stars Sonoya Mizuno, who has acted in every one of Garland’s projects, and also features a cast who star in Civil War, including Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nick Offerman, Karl Glusman and Jin Ha. Stream Devs on Disney+.
Garland went the folk horror route with his wildly polarizing 2022 film Men, starring Jessie Buckley as a grieving woman who seeks solace in a small village in the Cotswolds, seemingly only populated by men, who are all played by Rory Kinnear. It’s a surreal, utterly bone-chilling film of body horror, suspense, home invasion and something else entirely, utterly original and disturbing. Men, Garland’s exploration of gender, is not for everyone but it is perhaps his most daring work. Stream on Prime Video.