I freaking love this guy. Garland doesn’t have a long track record, only 4 movies and one TV show, but they are all fucking bangers. He’s written a lot more (The Beach, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go, and Dredd) that have really cemented him as an intriguing director, very much an intense auteur, but I’m just sticking with his directed pictures here. I also enjoy when directors reuse their actors, as it becomes an interesting ‘meta’ aspect - Garland has used actress Sonoya Mizuno in all of his directed projects, and frequently reuses other actors as well. I think in general, this director is best described as a grim futurist.
This guy does a lot of wild shit, so full spoilers ahead for all his movies.
Ex Machina: “When you make a new model, what do you do with the old one?”
(https://www.etsy.com/listing/233941400/ex-machina-film-poster)
A young programmer wins a contest to hang out with a reclusive inventor, who is revealed to have developed a hot android…that says it needs help. I’ve shown this movie to many people, and it is one of my favorites of the last decade. This does a great job of extending the Blade Runner “what is life and what is AI?” discussion. Is Nathan creating life with his androids? At what point are they slaves?
First of all, what a superlatively awesome directorial debut! Garland is not fucking around. He jumps into a cerebral duel between a programmer and maniacal inventor right from the get-go, and he has Domnhall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac and Alicia Vikander to play with. As with many Garland projects, this is a highly beneficial project to watch multiple times. Second, I was very impressed by this because the art direction is flat-out stellar. This movie just LOOKS great. For Garland’s first outing, it’s rare for a director to make something so thematically interesting, AND visually distinctive.
Gleeson is great as a tech naif, Isaac is great as a (possibly psychotic) tech-bro and Vikander looks like a freaking robot! She has so many tiny birdlike movements, that really makes her appear like she is an android processing what someone just said. You can just barely tell that she has a foreign accent (she’s Swedish - some of her lines go “Ah you mawwied?” and “What about youh famileyh?”) She is an exceptional actress and shows a lot of her talent here, including some ballsy full frontal. I usually dont spend too much time on actors, but Gleeson and Isaac are wonderful together. When you have a movie like this, it’s important to nail the casting of the two leads, and there’s great chemistry. Caleb manipulates Nathan, just as Ava manipulates Caleb. Just a big old manipulation chain. For example, they reference the famous Turing test, where a computer is tested to see whether it is a human. As much as they are testing Ava, she is testing them.
I’m a big “the first time we see them/it” guy. What’s the first shot of a movie and what does it tell us? What’s the first time we see a character, and what are they doing? The first time we see Caleb, he is being scanned by his computer - so we know he is being targeted - and the first time we see Nathan he is attacking a punching bag, illustrative of violence brewing under the surface. Fuckin nice Garland. These seeds go on to sprout later on.
When the power cuts out, we have what is known in the film industry as a 180 degree rule break. Essentially, check out this diagram:
https://gopixelr.com/understand-the-180-degree-rule-in-film-and-how-to-break-it/
If two people were talking to your left and right, you would ordinarily look at them to the left and the right. The “180 degree break” is taking that line between those two people, and jumping on the opposite side of it. You’re looking at a scene from one angle, and then BAM, it’s on the other angle. It’s supposed to be a jarring effect, and it is used by many filmmakers to advance a significant plot point. It works especially well when Garland whips it out here, to amplify anxiety.. Later, Isaac says “what about the power cut?” and there is another 180 degree line break, indicating that a line has been crossed (the camera literally having crossed it) and that he is onto Gleeson.
Like Kurosawa, we get some bad ass clouds indicating stormy futures for the characters! Always gotta point to Kurosawa links. Isaac tips his hand at about the 35 minute mark: he says he did the Dark Knight move where he hacked all the microphones & cameras of the cellphones of the entire planet. We know he scanned Gleeson, he just told us implicitly. We also are told things that we don’t automatically process right away: Isaac is pumping iron in one morning scene, after his Japanese robot (Mizuno) walks out of the scene. He refers to her as an “alarm clock”. Later, he tells Gleeson that he can, in fact, have sex with Ava…which he probably did himself…and then we realize that he almost certainly did with Mizuno-bot, that he just referred to as an alarm clock. The film cuts to her, as if wondering what they were talking about. There’s also a cut to when Nathan is asking Ava about consciousness - again it hard cuts to Mizuno-bot, who opens her eyes.
This movie began Garland’s love affair with janky, angular sound design. There is a lot in the music and soundtrack that makes you uneasy and jumpy, and this continues throughout his directorial career. It’s not as prevalent in this as others, but there are a lot of dissonant “ooooo” and “aaaaa''s going on that lend themselves to being actual tracks in the “woomy” sound design. The power cuts are a great alarming blast.
Things don’t go so well for our bois. Later, when the two robots stab Nathan, the scariest part of it is, they look curious, as if they weren’t sure what was going to happen when they did it.
I love this movie and recommend it to as many people who will listen. This won Best Academy Award for Visual Effects for a reason.
I think this is a classic Garland shot, if that can be said:
The only real issue that I have with this movie is that I think it should have hard cut to black when Ava rides the elevator out of the lair, and leaves Gleeson alone locked there. We have a few shots of her out in the Real World, where we realize she’s FREE, but I think it simply would have been more effective if, BOOM, that was the end of the film. Very minor critique. Totally killer debut and amazing film. I went on a little long about this one, but I love it.
Annihilation:
A female scientist encounters her husband, whom she thought lost in a special assignment, and takes his place in the group to investigate paranormal activity.
OHHH MAN, Garland + H.P. Lovecraft! This is based on a graphic novel, and also, the short story “The Color Out Of Space”, in which an asteroid crashes into Earth and corrupts everything around it. Honestly this is one of the most disturbing movies that I’ve ever seen, though I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s fantastically eldritch - the Shimmer area that Natalie’s team travels into has everything blending into other things. This sounds interesting and peaceful until you consider animal and human life is part of things things that get comingled together, in which case it becomes horrific. This time around, I got so into the ending that I accidentally blew out my audio receiver because I cranked the volume too high.
Right from the start, we get the motif of the Shimmer blending in all types of life, featuring two aspects of the intro: the first one is, Garland always has some interesting music choices. Here he uses Helplessly Hoping by Crosby, Stills & Nash. It’s a great longing song, which fits with Natalie mourning the husband she thought dead. The chorus is:
They are one person
They are two alone
They are three together
They are for each other
The second foreboding element is when Isaac holds Natalie’s hand behind a glass of water.
We see the literal amalgamation of people, animal and plant life later, but here’s a strong foreshadowing of it. There’s general creepiness and spookitude right up until the team enters The Shimmer.
Things go bad pretty quickly for our intrepid crew, who are all female. I had the same thought most people probably did - why make the choice to go all women for the team? - not as a complaint, but just as a wonder. I thought that the all-male crews all getting killed or lost may have resulted in a science team saying “well, we’ll do the opposite for the next one”, but I actually realized it didn’t matter. I found that Garland was asked this question and, though initially wanting to dodge the question, had the same response:
I think in essence I had just done a film, “Ex Machina,” that, as part of its set of concerns, is concerned with gender, and there was a conversation within it about gender. In this what I was interested in doing was almost the absence of a discussion, that that was in itself a statement of sorts. There’s one real reference to it, and then it’s pointed out that they’re scientists.
Answer: Whatever. Doesn’t really matter.
What does matter is how quickly things go bad. The crew is attacked by a crazed mutant alligator that Natalie realizes should not exist, based on her knowledge of biology. They travel further and see something out of The Last Of Us:
Good thing this is just a chill movie. Damn man. This guy was actually part of Oscar Isaac’s unit, and Natalie sees him cut open a friend’s belly to see his guts moving as if they were snakes! The anxiety-inducing “Eeeeeeehhhhhhh” in the soundtrack really does it in this scene too, more progression in the crazy sound design. This ultra creepy stuff is why this movie is successful: we haven’t seen anything like it before. This goes for something a few scenes ahead: a hot girl on the team is attacked by something big and unknown. Turns out it’s a gigantic mutated bear who has partially merged with the girl, so much so that it can scream HELP ME like a human. Right in Natalie’s face.
DAMN MAN. I didn’t notice it for a long time, but on the bear’s left side, that eye is shared by a human skull embedded in its face!
They press on, with one of the team basically turning into a tree. As they cut back and forth from the future to the present, we see that Natalie has a tattoo on her left arm. This is actually a tattoo that another teammate has, but somehow, the Shimmer grafted it onto Natalie through their journey.
The finale at the lighthouse is a candidate for one of the best scifi scenes ever. First, Natalie sees a giant burn on the wall with a scorched body, and a camera pointed at it, then plays the camera video to discover that the cinder is actually her husband Isaac…that we saw at the beginning of the movie…and then a copy of Isaac walks into frame! Moments later, Natalie sees the source of the Shimmer: an alien sphere that turns into a silvery copy of Natalie. This is SO OUT OF H.P. LOVECRAFT. Also, Sonoya Mizuno is in this movie as one of the students in the beginning, but she also plays the alien copy of Natalie!
I realize that I basically just described a lot of this movie instead of talking about directing, composition, acting or casting techniques, but there are so many wonderfully disturbing scenes that I just marvel at them. I also love that we are not left with a lot of answers, just questions.
Devs: A woman investigates the suspicious death of her boyfriend, who worked for a highly advanced tech company. This is way deeper than it appears on the surface. A fairly simple plot is revealed to be massively more interesting.
Devs was designed as a one-off miniseries without any possibility for a sequel, which really works in its favor. I find that miniseries are so much more compelling than something like The Office, where a studio just squeezes every last drop of content out of a franchise. With miniseries, you shoot your shot and get what you get. There also is not a ton of other places I think this could go, so again you have to hit everything in one season.
We got Mizuno again, upgraded from dancing robot lady in Ex Machina to the lead! She is…OK. There are some scenes where you wonder exactly why she, and not someone else, was cast, but then again she has some very emotional scenes where she crushes it. I’d say she is not excellent as an actress by herself, but Garland pulls an exceptional performance out of her. Nick Offerman is great as a Steve Jobs-like recluse, and Allison Pill is also really good as his lieutenant and lover. I wish this Russian spy dude got some more episodes, as he is a really cool addition, but he’s quickly killed by the a-hole security guy.
I could have written a whole essay on just this series and its comments on predestination vs. free will. To make it short: I used to think that free will existed but I’m listening to more arguments on the opposite view, and they’re starting to make more sense. If you are faced with a series of 4 doors, you can pick which door to open…but there are only 4 doors to open. If you are given options but can only pick between those options, are you really free to choose? You’re going to pick one of them. This is similar to how our genes and other things beyond our control govern our behavior. That’s a very quick (and bad) summation of a very deep topic that I won’t go too much further into - just to say that this concept is brilliantly realized in the show.
When Offerman has a worker killed, he tells the guy that he knew he was going to commit espionage because he saw it in the Devs machine, which turns out to be a quantum projector. You can use it to basically see anything throughout history in the past - including the Crucifixion -
- or at least a version of it, to the extreme irritation of Offerman, but in the future it only projects so far because of the fuzziness associated with all of the insane possibilities of choices being made on top of choices. This could be why the Devs crew is outwitted by Mizuno in the end - they said that she would go to Devs and die there because they saw it in the machine. It didn’t go the way they thought, but it still happened.
In the finale, everyone is shocked that Mizuno does not kill Offerman because they all saw it happen so many times in the Devs Machine…but the prophecy of Offerman and Mizuno dying is still fulfilled, because a dude sabotages their elevator and they fall to their deaths. Here’s where I start to ask some questions - couldn’t Stephen McKinley Henderson could have not have done that, just like Mizuno refused to shoot Offerman? Whatever, if you ask too many questions, just like the projector, it gets fuzzy.
Great cinematography and more advanced, kooky sound design keeps you on your toes. This is a very interesting show about probability, free will, blended in with some sci-fi. Really enjoyed. I don’t think it nailed everything, but it shows that Garland continued to play with high-concept ideas.
Men: A woman dealing with the grief of her husband’s accidental death, encounters a man…or men?? in a quiet English country manor.
HOLY SHIT this movie is cray. I walked into it without knowing anything about it except that Garland directed it. It was a quiet, spooky folk tale, but it turned into a wild Cronenberg-esque body-horror episode. Though starting out as a scary movie, it becomes a psychological thriller - I believe that all the men in the film are not real, and it’s all a hangover from Harper (the female protagonist)’s trauma she incurred.
The main (really, only) male actor is Rory Kinnear, a Brit I recognized from a whole slew of movies.
The lead, Harper, encounters him as the cottage renter, but then a naked dude accosts her and is arrested by police. You only see his face directly for a very short moment, but I said, “hey wait a minute, that’s the same guy…right?” The camera pans to the policeman - and it’s Rory Kinnear again! All the men in the movie are all different characters, all portrayed by Kinnear! He ends up playing at least six people in the movie, and it becomes rather funny, until things get more fucked up. Of course, it could have all started because Harper, in original-sin style, eats an apple.
Essentially, the movie is indicating that men constantly victimize women by running over their concerns. The inciting incident is when Harper’s husband punches her, and she kicks him out. He runs up to the next floor’s apartment above theirs to try to get back in, but accidentally falls to his death. As Harper relays this to a vicar, he suggests that if she’d let him apologize, he’d still be alive. Then, the cops don’t take Harper’s complaints about the break-in seriously, a kid (again Kinnear, though CG) calls her a bitch for no reason, and that’s just the beginning.
The angular sound design returns when Harper goes into the forest, eventually finding a tunnel where she calls into it.
So a woman walks into nature and creates harmony, and then a man intrudes on her to ruin it.
As things fly off the handle, Harper is able to stab an attacker through the mail slot of the manor, who then pulls his hand out, splitting his entire arm down the center. This is the “Green Man” aspect of the Men in this movie - but then the vicar shows up at the manor with the same split arm injury! So they’re all really the same entity, to Harper.
And then…the ending “rebirth” sequence. I was making eggs when I first saw this and I had to stop the film for a while and switch to something else for my breakfast because it’s so gross. The Green Man appears again at the mansion and gives birth to another Man from the movie - the kid. In turn, he gives birth to more and more Rory Kinnears until Harper is left looking at her dead husband. Now, these “births” are more like “emergences”. There is what appears to be a vagina in these men that the new life form comes out of, but eventually the new entity is just breaking out of its older shell. It’s quite something, best watched on an empty stomach though. To get an idea for it, jump to 10:20 in this video.
Eventually, the last man to emerge is Harper’s dead husband simply tells her that he wants her love. Harper’s actress, Jessie Buckley, said of the ending that it was the protagonist coming to terms with the monsters that she has been carrying around. She’s externalizing AND internalizing the things that the men have been saying and doing to her, and eventually comes to terms with how to live with them. Kinnear said that the ending is a form of coping with grief, by watching the traumatic event come up again and again and learning to coexist with them in your memory.
Really cool movie, if not totally insane.
Civil War: The US broke apart again, and photojournalists seek a meeting with the president.
This is an extremely interesting concept that does not succeed as a movie, for the exact reason that Garland made its premise: We dont know what led to the start of the civil war. HELLO GARLAND. That’s only the first question we ask! We are given hints that, in a not-so-veiled reference to Trump, Offerman abused his position as president and went crazy, and states broke off to rebel against the federal government. But when we learn that the details include Texas joining its ideological opposite state of California, this is where you start to realize that Garland, as a Brit, doesn’t have a good handle on his material. That shit just would not happen, and then we’re left asking more questions. Garland’s excuse of “well, when we’re in a war, it doesn’t matter how we got there” is technically true, for the war journalists, but very emotionally unsatisfying. This scene is supposed to encapsulate this thought as well: “No one’s giving us orders, man. Someone’s trying to kill us. We’re trying to kill them.” It’s just not as profound as they think.
To give some good credit, there are some extremely intense scenes, and it’s nice to see Kirsten Dunst acting again, I feel like I haven’t seen her in a long time. Cailee Spaeny - from Devs - is the naive young journalist who gets taken under Dunst’s wing. Mizuno appears as a cameo journalist, but the leads of Pablo Escobar, Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Speight and Stephen Hendrickson (also in Devs) are a solid, believable cast.
The really cool parts are some quick throwaway lines. When negotiating for gasoline, three armed men at a gas station prioritize taking Canadian dollars from the journalists. OK, now you got my attention, why did that happen? How’d that come to be? But as cool as those parts are, they’re lessened by the other sections where things don’t work.
In another scene, after a long gunfight, the winning side executes several prisoners via M240 machine gun. Just straight up murder. Again: WHY and HOW did the two sides get so pissed off at the other, that they’re willing to kill prisoners of war without even interrogating them for intelligence beforehand? Including the end, where the rebels kill the president nearly on-sight! Even if the Union had captured Jefferson Davis, I doubt very much we’d have executed him. It’d be a crazy casus belli to hate the other side that much, but, I guess we’ll never know, huh?
The best scene is the one my doppleganger Jesse Plemons, because you absolutely believe that this could easily happen in a true civil war.
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All right! Very long post, but I wanted to get all of Garland. Damn good director dealing with really interesting subject matter throughout all his projects. Definitely a director to keep your eye on.