Alex Garland - vo.rs

Sunshine: Boyle's Beautiful Film That Loses Its Nerve in Act Three

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:00:00 +0000

There is a version of Sunshine that would sit in the top rank of space films, quoted in the same breath as 2001 and Alien, and for roughly seventy minutes Danny Boyle actually made it. Then, with the destination in sight, the 2007 film reaches into a different drawer, pulls out a slasher, and spends its final act being chased around the corridors by a monster it did not need. Almost twenty years on, that swerve is still the most discussed thing about the picture, and the argument it started — did the third act ruin Sunshine or merely complicate it? — is worth reopening, because the answer tells you something about how hard science fiction is allowed to end.

Annihilation: The Studio's Nerve Failed, the Film Didn't

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Paramount had a problem with Alex Garland’s second feature, and the problem was that somebody had watched it closely. Late in 2017 the film tested badly. Audiences came out confused and rattled, and David Ellison — whose Skydance money was inside the picture — pushed for changes: soften Natalie Portman’s biologist, warm up Jennifer Jason Leigh’s psychologist, and rework an ending that sends a paying crowd home without the reassurance they came for. Producer Scott Rudin held Garland’s contractual final cut and declined to open it. Left with a film it no longer knew how to sell, the studio arranged an exit. Paramount kept theatrical rights in the United States, Canada and China, and handed the rest of the planet to Netflix, where Annihilation surfaced a few weeks after its American opening as something you scrolled past on a quiet Tuesday.

Ex Machina: The Turing Test as a Chamber Thriller

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Alex Garland had written novels and screenplays for years before he directed anything, and it shows in Ex Machina, his 2014 debut, which moves with the confidence of someone who has been thinking about this exact story for a very long time. It is a science-fiction film with almost no science-fiction furniture — no city, no crowds, no future skyline. Four characters, one remote house, and a question that gets quietly nastier the longer you sit with it: when a machine convinces you it is a person, who exactly has passed the test, and who has failed?