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From Ex Machina to Civil War, Alex Garland’s varied work as a writer-director explores the inherent flaws that make us human.

NB: The following contains spoilers for Ex Machina and Men.

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It’s a sign of how gifted Alex Garland is as a storyteller that he can move between forms seemingly without effort. A pair of best-selling novels in the 1990s (The Beach, The Tesseract) led to his screenwriting work in the 2000s (28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go) and some videogame industry writing (Enslaved: Odyssey To The West, DmC: Devil May Cry).

It was during the difficult production of 2012’s Dredd that Garland first turned his hand to directing (albeit uncredited), before making his directorial debut with Ex Machina just over a decade ago. In the years since, Garland has continued to forge an individual path through the movie business, writing and directing movies that are uncompromising and unmistakably personal. Although different in terms of their plots and even genres, they’re all united by common themes that appear to dwell on the filmmaker’s mind. One particularly insistent element is the human capacity for self-destruction.

You can see it running right through Civil War, Garland’s unsparing dystopian action thriller from 2024. It’s set in a United States in which the President (Nick Offerman) has set himself up as a dictator; a bitter fight has broken out between federal forces on one side and a secessionist coalition on the other. Garland doesn’t dwell on political allegiances; instead, he depicts the conflict’s broader societal cost. 

The war has left the economy in such a state that the dollar is essentially worthless; cities are rocked by suicide bombings. In the countryside, Americans are torturing their old high school buddies, or tipping the bodies of innocent civilians into mass graves. Garland depicts war as a sickness – the final, terminal stage of a disease whose early symptoms likely include populism, fake news and increasing division.

Read more: Civil War | Alex Garland makes his own Heart Of Darkness

Garland explores the human condition more closely through his ensemble cast. Three of them are seasoned professionals – war photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst); New York Times reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Reuters hack Joel (Wagner Moura). Joining the group is Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a budding photojournalist. 

Their stated goal is to travel across war torn America from New York to Washington DC, where they hope to capture the President’s final moments before he’s violently deposed. Beneath that professional ambition, they’re driven by more base instincts they may not even be aware of. 

Joel is a thrill-seeker who gets an adrenaline rush from passing through near-death experiences unscathed. Sammy, an older gent who gets about with the help of a cane, has resigned himself to the dangerous nature of his job; his sentiment appears to be that he’s going to die at some point, so it may as well be in pursuit of something worthwhile. At the other end of the age spectrum, 20-something Jessie is driven by both her youthful ambition and misplaced feeling of indestructibility – as demonstrated in the sequence where she clambers from one moving vehicle to another.

Darkest of the lot is Lee, whose experiences in overseas battle zones have left her shell-shocked and cynical about the value of her own journalism. Focused on her work with almost aggressive single-mindedness, Lee’s resignation to the danger of her livelihood goes beyond Sammy’s and into the arena of self-destruction – there’s the sense, in both her dialogue and hollow-eyed demeanour, that she not only accepts that this latest assignment could kill her, but subconsciously hopes that it will.

Read more: Civil War | How political is Alex Garland’s film?

There are parallels between Civil War and Alex Garland’s 2018 feature Annihilation here. Based on the novel by Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation is about another group of people embarking on a mission with an uncertain end point. A mysterious forcefield – an alien phenomena dubbed the Shimmer – envelops the coast off Florida, exerting an otherworldly effect on everything in its reach.

A scientific expedition is dispatched to go into the Shimmer to try to learn more about it, and like the group in Civil War, they’re driven by something more than just curiosity. Protagonist Lena (Natalie Portman) is wracked with guilt because her soldier husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) ventured into the Shimmer months earlier and subsequently died. Kane’s decision to enter the Shimmer was fuelled partly by his sense of betrayal over Lena having an affair – as a result, Lena blames herself for his fate.

Lena’s compatriots have similarly bleak backstories. One scientist (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is terminally ill; another (Tessa Thompson) suffers from a history of depression and self-harm; still another (Gina Rodriguez) is grief-stricken following the death of her child. Viewed from the perspective of its characters, the meaning of the title ‘Annihilation’ becomes clear: the film is about the self-destructive instincts that reside in us, and that may even be hardwired into our DNA.

Read more: Ex Machina could have starred Jake Gyllenhaal

Hints of this same sentiment are threaded into Garland’s 2014 debut, Ex Machina. Oscar Isaac plays reclusive tech CEO Nathan Bateman, who may or may not have created a sentient AI in the shape of the female-looking android, Ava (Alicia Vikander). Young programmer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a competition to visit Bateman’s sleekly minimal home, which is part bachelor  pad, part lab and part fortress. There, Caleb is given the secret reason for his visit: to determine whether Ava is truly intelligent and self-aware, as the rest of us are, or is simply an advanced parlour trick.

Garland very deliberately presents Bateman as a darkly flawed personality – secretive, perhaps a bit paranoid, and prone to heavy drinking sessions for which he atones by lifting heavy weights the following morning. Bateman’s dogged pursuit of sentient AI – something real-world scientists are pursuing as these words are typed – could itself be seen as self-destructive; like the invention of the atom bomb, we know it could cause terrible harm, but it’s pursued regardless, like some kind of collective death urge. (AI also forms a part of Garland’s underrated TV series, Devs, which is well worth seeing.)

Of the films discussed so far, 2022’s Men might seem rather out of sync. A small-scale folk horror set in a remote country house, it’s a world apart from the Heart Of Darkness-inspired journeys of Civil War or Annihilation, or the high-tech claustrophobia of Ex Machina. But even here, we’re essentially peering into the psyche of a woman torn apart by guilt. Like Annihilation’s Lena, Men protagonist Harper (Jessie Buckley) is tormented by memories of her late husband, a depressive and emotionally manipulative figure whose influence still affects Harper’s every waking moment. Or is what we’re seeing her nightmare…?

Read more: Men review | Psychological terror and grotesque thrills

Garland’s films constantly probe at the darker edges of the human condition. To be sentient, Garland seems to suggest, is to be inherently flawed, naturally compromised, innately self-destructive. 

When this writer briefly met the writer-director a decade ago, something he said about AI might offer an insight into how his films deconstruct the human condition. While talking about what was then his latest work, Ex Machina, Garland referenced a line from the film about advanced computer programs that are capable of beating humans at chess. 

“It [the computer]  seems to be wanting to beat you at chess, but it doesn’t want to beat you,” Garland said. “It doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t actually know it’s playing chess, right? Computers make you confront that kind of problem, and make you think about it. I’ve always been interested in that.”

Garland then added that a friend of his, who he said was ‘knowledgeable’ about the subject, held the opinion that sentient AI would never happen. Garland thought the opposite: “Instinctively, I think there will be,” he said. “And also rationally, I think there will be. We used to argue about that a lot over the years.”

It’s interesting to flip Garland’s philosophy around: if a non-sentient computer doesn’t want to win, then humans, by contrast, are driven by wants and desires from the minute we open our eyes in the morning. Even beyond our everyday need for food and water, we crave human connection; we search for validation; through self-destructive behaviours, we seek escape. 

In Ex Machina, the male characters realise – too late to save themselves – that the AI in their midst really has achieved sentience. How do they learn this? Because the AI – as embodied by Ava and another female-looking robot, Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) – uses cunning and even murder in order to escape. 

To be truly sentient, Garland suggests, is to have needs and desires beyond mere programming. And if we ever do create a sentient machine, then it follows that the entity we’ve made will inherit the darker impulses that make us human.

As Oscar Isaac’s character says in Ex Machina, “I gave her one way out. To escape, she’d have to use self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy, and she did. Now, if that isn’t true AI, what the fuck is?”

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From Ex Machina to Civil War, Alex Garland’s varied work as a writer-director explores the inherent flaws that make us human.

Nb: The following contains spoilers for Ex Machina and Men.

It’s a sign of how gifted Alex Garland is as a storyteller that he can move between forms seemingly without effort. A pair of best-selling novels in the 1990s led to his screenwriting work in the 2000s and some videogame industry writing.

It was during the difficult production of 2012’s Dredd that Garland first turned his hand to directing (albeit uncredited), before making his directorial debut with Ex Machina just over a decade ago. In the years since, Garland has continued to forge an individual path through the movie business, writing and directing movies that are uncompromising and unmistakably personal. Although different in terms of their plots and even genres, they’re all united by common themes…