From ‘28 Days Later’ To ‘Sunshine’, Alex Garland Has Been Shaping Sci-Fi Cinema For Decades

This weekend, the Natalie Portman-starring sci-fi mind-bender Annihilation hits theaters, and it’s enjoying some majorly rapturous reviews. The film’s vision of an alien “shimmer” that bends the reality of everything that resides inside it is captivating, thought-provoking, and at times genuinely terrifying. It’s the sci-fi hit of the season, at least if you go by Rotten Tomatoes scores (91%). It could end up being a decent-sized indie hit as well, if director Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is any kind of predictor. Ex Machina was a great little success for A24 a couple years ago, hauling in $25 million domestically (good enough to be A24’s third-best-performing film ever) and won an Academy Award for Best Visual effects. In a movie landscape that feels increasingly like it’s either comic-book-based blockbuster or bust, Ex Machina feels like the blueprint for how smart, suspenseful science fiction for adults can be successful.

So with Annihilation ranking among the year’s best-received films, it’s probably time to show a bunch of love to Alex Garland, the director behind the film, who adapted Jeff VanderMeer’s novel, making significant changes to the plot with his screenplay, and ultimately producing what some critics are calling a companion piece to the Annihilation novel rather than any kind of straight telling of its story. This might come as a surprise to anyone who hasn’t been following Garland’s career. Though Ex Machina was his first stint in the director’s chair, Garland’s words have been the basis for a handful of the best and most thought-provoking sci-fi of the last 15 years or so.

Here’s a quick tour through Alex Garland’s films, why they matter, and where you can stream them.

The Beach

Garland’s 1996 novel about a bunch of American college kids who go vacationing in Thailand and are directed to an isolated and (seemingly) idyllic beach with an isolationist community all its own was adapted by director Danny Boyle into this 2000 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Boyle was coming off of Trainspotting and A Life Less Ordinary, while DiCaprio was still basically untouchable from Titanic. It would be DiCaprio’s first real taste of failure, as the film failed to catch on with critics or with audiences. The film isn’t a success, it’s true, but as a failure, it’s one of the more fascinating failures you’re likely to see. It’s also fully watchable, which is to say you won’t have a bad time watching it — no movie where Leo DiCaprio and Tilda Swinton have sex in a tent is even close to being worthless — and it gives you a lot to think about, both regarding the film and DiCaprio’s career trajectory. And, failure or not, it put Garland and Boyle into each other’s orbits, which would end up yielding some genius results for both of them.

Where Can You Stream It? It’s rentable on Amazon Prime and iTunes

Where to stream The Beach

28 Days Later

After The Beach, Garland came to Boyle with the idea for a zombie movie … where the zombies can run. Yes, Alex Garland is who we have to thank/blame for fast zombies. (Fast zombies are fine. Fast zombies in 28 Days Later are GREAT.) Coming off of the shared disappointment of The Beach, 28 Days Later didn’t really have any expectations on it. No Leonardo DiCaprio this time. Nobody had any idea who Cillian Murphy or Naomie Harris were, and the digital-video aesthetic really contributed to the sense of the movie as a low-budget throwaway. Those expectations couldn’t have been more wrong. It may well be the best movie Danny Boyle ever made, equal parts terrifyingly bloody and harrowingly human. A critical and commercial success, the film gave Garland a huge career boost in his first go as a screenwriter.

Where Can You Stream It? It’s rentable on Amazon Prime and iTunes

Where to stream 28 Days Later

Sunshine

How do you judge success or failure, really? Commercially, Sunshine never got out of the starting gates and crawled to a paltry $3 million domestic. Critics were generally positive about the film but not effusive. It’s generally thought of as Danny Boyle’s low point before rebounding with Slumdog Millionaire. But the thing about Sunshine is … it’s the best? It’s the band-of-scientists-in-space movie that you desperately want something bad like The Cloverfield Paradox to be. The ensemble cast is killer — Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh — and only looks better in retrospect. The story, of a band of scientists on a course to re-ignite the sun with a nuclear device, obviously, is urgent, the filmmaking does from elegant to intense, and it’s perhaps the greatest film score of the past 25 years, and the reason you know it is that so many other movies steal it for their trailers. As he does in Annihilation, Garland explores the dynamics of what happens when a group seeking knowledge comes face-to-face with universal forces so powerful they border on the religiously ecstatic. It’s also just a tremendously intense space thriller. If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourselves a favor.

Where Can You Stream It? It’s rentable on Amazon Prime and iTunes

Where to stream Sunshine

Never Let Me Go

After two straight original screenplays for Danny Boyle, here Garland delivers his first adapted screenplay, though it was for a novel with which he was intimately familiar. As a longtime friend of author Kazuo Ishiguro, Garland knew about the existence of Never Let Me Go before it was even finished, and he wasn’t even through reading it before he started asking Ishiguro if he could adapt it. Music-video director extraordinaire Mark Romanek had moved into film directing with the well-reviewed One Hour Photo, and he was brought on to direct this. The story is quietly sci-fi, in that it presents initially as the story of a bunch of school children at an English boarding school. The nature of the school, and of the children, gets slowly revealed, and by the time we’re following them as adults — played by Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield — there’s a sad, darkly romantic, but fatalistic air to their story. It’s a beautifully emotional tale, and Garland does the book justice.

Where Can You Stream It? It’s streaming on Netflix.

Where to stream Never Let Me Go

Dredd

The only truly skippable movie on Garland’s entire filmography is this, Hollywood’s second crack at the Judge Dredd comic-book universe. Which isn’t to say it’s bad — 78% on Rotten Tomatoes should say something, even if what it’s mostly saying is “Not nearly as bad as that film Sylvester Stallone made about this character.” Critics praised the film’s sense of humor and its action, but it would be tough to make the case that in the five years since its release that it’s lingered in the public consciousness the way Sunshine or 28 Days Later or even Never Let Me Go had.

Where Can You Stream It? It’s rentable on Amazon Prime and iTunes

Where to stream Dredd

Ex Machina

With a strong batting-average of screenplay credits under his belt, Garland finally was ready to step into the director’s chair himself. Kept on an incredibly small budget given the effects and general look and feel of the project, Garland was able to keep tight auteurist control over the project, and the result was one of the most singular sci-fi visions in recent memory, and critics and audiences responded to it accordingly. Domhnall Gleeson (who appeared briefly in Never Let Me Go), Oscar Isaac, and Alicia Vikander delivered A-list-caliber performances, and the film ended up helping all three of them level up in Hollywood, in conjunction with Gleeson and Isaac getting Star Wars gigs and Vikander winning an Oscar in all. With Ex Machina, Garland put his unmistakable stamp on 21st century science-fiction filmmaking, and with Annihilation, he’s only going to make that stamp more permanent.

Where Can You Stream It? It’s rentable on Amazon Prime and iTunes

Where to stream Ex Machina