Web Series Review: Devs by Alex Garland

The world is deterministic and apparently, there is no room for free will, until… there is, in the Christian way, that is.

Like the previous movie Ex Machina, combined with beautiful cinematography, music, a matured script and not to mention, great acting, Devs takes us for a ride into the inner world of Alex Garland driven by the tormenting tides of tech-phobia and deeply rooted inclination towards religious templates to define the world.

Garland’s anthologized view of knowledge-driven entrepreneurship, his fear for technology coupled with his strong inclination towards Christian scheme of the universe is the very specimen of the dysfunctional American society that epitomizes this kind of narrative. Apart from Katie’s (superbly played by Alison Pill) lucid explanation of determinism and how every seemingly random event is nothing but a computational challenge, the next best take away would certainly be the steller cinematography which is also Garland’s signature. The juxtaposition of nature with the tech bubble in it, the grayish almost maze-like interior contrasted with the leafy-green exterior, the glass separating digital from human… evil from civil and not to mention, the strong Christian connotation that he manages to keep beneath the surface of the apparent narrative.

Although built on somewhat a cliched template of Ex Machina “boss is evil philosophically, rest is civil ecologically”, and written with Garland’s trademark style with shallow characters, the movie manages to discuss the ideas such as determinism, many world interpretations of Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the questions of free will with much meat, comparatively, way beyond any other content available today.