For all of his evident flaws as an artist, Alex Garland is one of the few filmmakers in the world who is genuinely concerned with science and its methods. One of cinema’s great paradoxes is how a medium so dependent on science and technology is also so reliably hostile toward both. Garland—whose production company name is DNA Films—isn’t hostile; rather, he’s concerned about what science can deliver to humanity and the earth. He approaches the subject from a science-fact basis, surely influenced by a family legacy that includes Nobel laureate biologist Sir Peter Medawar, the so-called father of transplantation. Put another way, while most in his line of work worship at the altars of H.P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, and Frank Herbert, Garland is an Arthur C. Clarke man all the way.
All of which makes it strange to report that ventures into the wilds of ancient Christian and pre-Christian mythology and fable. Garland has been rigorously mum about his interpretation of what is easily the strangest English-language commercial release so far this year. Just as well: all the more room for the rest of us to play the game of unpacking things.
