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Alex Garland · 2020

OVERVIEW

Alex Garland's 2020 limited series. A quantum computing company in Silicon Valley runs a secret project that can reconstruct any moment in the past, and on its reading of physics, predict the future exactly.

The company campus is the argument: a redwood forest with a golden, vacuum-sealed cube suspended inside a building at its centre, reached by a walkway over a void.

WHY IT MATTERS

A near-perfect collision of severe architecture, technological mysticism and corporate power.

CONTEXT

Garland wrote and directed all eight episodes. Cinematography by Rob Hardy, score by Ben Salisbury, Geoff Barrow and The Insects, with choral writing used at a scale the subject matter does not obviously ask for.

The determinism argument is taken seriously rather than used as set dressing, which is unusual and is what makes the design read as religious rather than corporate.

WHAT TO NOTICE

  1. 01The cube is a reliquaryGold-clad, sealed, isolated on a suspended platform in a vacuum. The building treats the machine as a relic, not equipment.
  2. 02Scale against the redwoodsRepeated compositions put small human figures under enormous trees and an enormous statue. The show keeps insisting you are not the largest thing present.
  3. 03Sound carries the doctrineChoral and drone material enters whenever determinism is being asserted. The score is doing the theological work.
  4. 04Blurred predictionThe machine's early projections are noisy and smeared. Watch the image quality improve as the argument tightens.

CONNECTIONS

EXPLORE FURTHER

  • ARCHIVE / IMDbDevs

    Full craft credits. IMDb refuses automated requests, so open it in a browser.

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