Science Fictionalizing Silicon Valley

AP

Hulu hit “Devs” shows the highs and lows of tech work

These days, it’s not uncommon to hear a politician or other public voice call for the breakup of local tech giants like Facebook and Google. But in “Devs,” the recently finished mini-series from FX and Hulu, director Alex Garland takes on a bigger target, breaking up the entire Silicon Valley to reveal the dark shadows underneath.

The eight-part series revolves around a mysterious tech company called Amaya and its development division—“devs” for short—a front for a top-secret quantum computing project. In the first episode, Nick Offerman’s Forest, the founder and CEO of Amaya, offers Sergei, a young employee played by Carl Glusman, a position on the devs team. And though he doesn’t know it yet, Sergei’s decision will soon destroy not only his life, but his girlfriend’s too.

Anchoring the show is Sonoyo Mizuno, who plays Lily Chan, the girlfriend whose life Sergei ruins. The show primarily follows her perspective as she tries to help Sergei after he gets in over his head in the devs lab. In the process, she confronts tech firm thugs, competitive programmers and yes, Russian agents lurking in the shadows of Silicon Valley. 

She also faces Zach Grenier’s Kenton, Amaya’s head of security, who reminds viewers at times of “The Terminator” in his relentless devotion to “protecting the company.”

Though this all may sound a bit too much like the well-worn “person versus institution” premise, Garland and team offer enough twists to keep the show feeling fresh and captivating.

One of these new developments is the setting. Since the show explores an alternate reality version of Silicon Valley, Garland wisely chose to film in the actual area, making the UC Santa Cruz campus the location of Amaya’s headquarters and the series’ main set. Although the majority of the interior scenes were filmed in England, Garland exploits the lush forests and brutalist architecture of the university to characterize his magnificent and obstinately powerful tech firm.

Garland contrasts the utopian promise of Santa Cruz’s greenery with the dinginess of San Francisco, where several of the characters live. In these big-city scenes, cinematographer Rob Hardy capitalizes on the natural paranoia of the city, perfectly captured in classics like “The Conversation” or “Dirty Harry,” to make viewers feel like they’re either watching someone—or being watched—at all times. The fact that so many characters seem capable of hacking into your phone and listening to your every word with just a few quick keystrokes only adds to the anxiety.

And beyond the excitement of the setting and cinematography, Garland brings his own filmmaking vision to the project. Garland got his start writing “28 Days Later” as well as the novel that Danny Boyle would adapt into “The Beach.” In 2014, he made the fateful switch from writer to writer/director with the Oscar-nominated “Ex Machina” and then his disturbing follow-up, “Annihilation.”

“Devs” feels like a natural extension of Garland’s filmmaking. His plots already hinged on sci-fi mysteries with vague answers—if he chose to provide any—and the mini-series format allows him to draw out these questions to the point where, if you stop watching between episodes, you may just stay up all night with a whiteboard trying to work out the answers yourself. Like its characters, the show lends itself to the startup lifestyle.

Garland also accompanies his images with an overwhelming soundscape of pulsing synths and choirs, courtesy of Geoff Barrow, Ben Salisbury, and the Insects, in addition to an eclectic selection of popular music. As with the bizarre, enrapturing music of “Annihilation,” the “Devs” soundtrack gets under your skin and rattles your bones, just like the big-picture science fiction concepts Garland layers into his stories. Some of the more ominous sounds feel like the moans of ancient, Lovecraftian horrors, and for Garland, that’s the level of trouble these Silicon Valley engineers are unearthing.

Throughout his relatively young directorial career, critics have pointed to Garland as an inheritor of Stanley Kubrick’s approach to science fiction. And although Garland lacks Kubrick’s eye for precision—who doesn’t?—he possesses the master director’s knack for composing quietly unnerving shots that showcase the simultaneous strength and frailty of the human experience.

That said, this connection to the “2001: A Space Odyssey” director also comes with its fair share of problems. The tech-friendly Garland often feels more attuned to the ideas of the machines in his stories than the emotional cores of his characters, and several scenes in “Devs” ring hollow, as if the human actors had each been replaced by a HAL 9000. Additionally, Offerman’s Forest verges on the edge of the tech billionaire cliche, running the risk of almost becoming a parody until an effective outburst of mid-season plotting.

While many of these cold characters blend in with the chilly, impersonal offices and unfurnished, “minimalistic” houses littering Garland’s version of Silicon Valley, Garland offers enough warmth in characters like Jin Ha’s Jaime and Stephen McKinley Henderson’s Stewart to balance the emotional scorecard.

Moreover, in its wrestling with lofty concepts such as determinism, the show also offers one the coolest science fiction technologies of recent memory, though you’ll have to watch a few episodes until you see its full potential.

And this notion of waiting to see the full potential captures Garland’s overall approach to the show and Silicon Valley. Unlike more two-dimensional interpretations of the tech-fueled region like the Emma Watson star-vehicle “The Circle,” “Devs” finds cold beauty in the industries and alienated individuals designing the phones and search engines of the future, making many of the show’s science-fiction elements feel like a documentary from the near future.