Alex Garland has come a long way since The Beach made him a celebrated novelist at the end of the 1990s. Back then, his tale of drugs and excess on the Asian backpacking trail ensured he was cult literature’s next big thing, but Garland had bigger, grander plans for himself. As shown by Civil War, the latest movie dystopia written and directed by Garland, the British auteur has become one of sci-fi and fantasy cinema’s most important visionaries. Find out where to stream all his work in chronological order with our streaming guide, below.
The Beach became a film in 2000, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Danny Boyle. The screenplay wasn’t written by Garland, but he still struck up a relationship with Boyle, writing two of the British director’s subsequent films. The zombie/virus apocalypse horror 28 Days Later, with an original screenplay by Garland, was a huge hit; the thoughtful space drama Sunshine, which reunited Boyle and Garland with lead actor Cillian Murphy, was less successful but was still an imaginative, serious piece of work.
After providing uncredited rewrites for 28 Days Later sequel 28 Weeks Later, and dramatising the Kazuo Ishiguro novel Never Let Me Go for director Mark Romanek, Garland wrote Dredd, a comic-book adaptation now seen as a cult classic - according to star Karl Urban, Garland was so instrumental in completing the film after director Pete Travis left the project prematurely that he ought to be seen as its real director.
Then Garland did start officially directing his own scripts, and his career immediately stepped up a level. He started with Ex Machina, a tautly confined but visually stunning fable about an artificially intelligent robot that is dangerously close to human-like sentience. Next came what is perhaps Garland’s greatest achievement to date, the unforgettable Annihilation. Starring Natalie Portman as the leader of a group of female scientists sent to investigate an alien crash zone known for inexplicable happenings, it’s a very rare example of a high-concept horror that gets scarier and scarier as it goes on, without losing its philosophical thread.
Following that breakthrough, Garland took stock and pivoted briefly into television, helming a deep-thinking sci-fi series: Devs tells the story of an advanced quantum computing company whose bosses are willing to kill to protect their secrets.
Garland returned to cinema with a modern take on folk horror. Men sees Jessie Buckley play a traumatised widow whose holiday to a remote English village becomes a nightmare filled with visceral peril, but the twist - Rory Kinnear apparently playing multiple roles - places the film squarely in the Garland canon of movies with a big central idea, cannily executed.
That brings us to Civil War, which looks set to push Garland back towards the top of the box-office charts. Kirsten Dunst and regular Garland cast member Nick Offerman star in a sweeping tale about a near-future America descending into violence - Garland can be relied on to make that story as thrilling as it is thought-provoking.
Watch all of Alex Garland’s work in order using our streaming guide below.
