Fertile Ground in Hostile Lands

In this article, I will examine screenwriter Alex Garland's approach to world-building, with a particular focus on his screenplays Sunshine and Annihilation, exploring how Garland writes thematically for ‘genre’ stories and reflecting on the evolution of his world-building in his writing for film and television. The phrase ‘world-building’ conjures up images of physical settings and tangible places, but in a literary sense compelling world-building requires that a writer master their craft to create a landing for their readers in surprising new emotional and thematic spaces. Richard argues that world-building allows writers to explore themes and ideas, while writer Rebecca F. Kuang states that world-building can be a “refracting prism to exaggerate, re-interpret, and interrogate particular elements” (Adeniyi 121) which the writer wants to explore, or metaphorise. Screenwriter and showrunner Javier Grillo-Marxuach argues that a unifying concept or question sits at the heart of world-building, utilising tropes to build a new milieu or genre. Garland writes intellectual ‘genre’ screenplays across an eclectic range of milieux, whether he is reviving the zombie-horror subgenre in 28 Days Later (Garland), exploring deep space in the hard science-fiction film Sunshine (Garland), or the “drug-fuelled, ultra-violent” (Fennessey, 00:01:45) cyberpunk feature Dredd (Garland & Jock). “There's always a sense of trying to avoid what you just did and move against what you just did” (Fennessey, 00:02:01). Garland’s reactivity to his output informs his ever-changing choice of genre, but his screenplays also have commonality through the perspective of the adventure protagonist ur-genre (Edgar). The dramatic need of the protagonist in 28 Days Later is to save his surrogate family in post-apocolyptic Britain; the protagonist's goal in Sunshine is to save life on Earth by embarking on a journey to the Sun aboard the spacecraft Icarus 2; Annihilation’s protagonist embarks on a dangerous mission to discover what happened to her husband in the infected land of Area X; Dredd’s incorruptible police officer wants to impose law in a lawless tower block in the futuristic, post-apocolyptic Mega City One. Garland’s choice of milieu is not consistent but his recurring focus on a specific point of view and distinct setting is: strong, seemingly moral protagonists in a dramatic setting with a clear project that the viewer can empathise with. Roger Ebert described movies as empathy machines (“Roger Tribute”, 00:01:00); writers such as Garland are the engine of that machine, powering a cathartic process that allows readers and viewers to explore and relate to people outside their immediate experiences, through the protagonist’s dramatic journey through dangerous and strange lands that mirror our own anxieties and fears. Garland explains why he enjoys working within genre conventions: “what genre allows you to do is to use shorthand in lots of areas. That gets you a lot of mileage quite quickly, and then you’ve got space to subvert, do something strange, do something unsettling” (Howard). His subversiveness is apparent in his screenplay’s conceits, from his creation of running zombies in 28 Days Later (now ubiquitous in the zombie subgenre but novel at the time), to framing Sergei as the protagonist in Devs (Ep. 1) only to have him killed in the first episode: “all of that stuff is intentional, and some of it is just playful, some of it sometimes is a bit political actually, it's do with assumptions people make about protagonists” (O’Falt, 00:09:01). These twists on existing tropes shatter any sense of safety the reader might otherwise find from the familiar, and this technique hooks their interest and lures them into the world of the story (Simmonds). Communicating theme to the reader is vital for a screenplay’s success (McKenzie). As screenwriter and showrunner Javier Grillo-Marxuach argues, “the right thematic concern in the right hands can release an incredible amount of narrative power”. Writers often have thematic interests which recur in their writing. Garland is interested in questions of science and philosophy (Krauss). These influence the themes he explores within his work, “but it's not motivated by me trying to provoke questions in other people, it's more me trying to figure it out, and then my means ... of then sort of processing that becomes writing a story” (Krauss, 00:27:14). Garland has identified several different thematic interests he explored in Sunshine, including genre-specific, philosophical, and religious themes. As Lowenstein identifies in his analysis of filmmaker Ben Wheatley’s work, cinematic spaces and genre can be explicitly linked in the viewer's imagination, which creates fertile ground for subversion if a screenwriter chooses. Garland deftly establishes the milieu of Sunshine through his ‘short-hand’ (Howard) descriptions of the interior and exterior of the story's setting, the spaceship Icarus 2, creating a visual narrative focussing on the futuristic technology of the ship, easily allowing the audience to acclimate to the story’s science-fiction genre and set their expectations with the conventional visual and auditory narrative. Garland utilises this setting in tandem with the plot and dialogue to explore generic science-fiction themes, including “that what man finds in space is his subconscious” (Sunshine, vii). Garland exposes this through the conflicting reactions of the characters to their increasingly deadly situation as the story progresses past the first plot point. Capa’s pragmatic attitude to their chances of survival, summarised in his line of dialogue “I can live with not going home” (Garland, Sunshine, 59), is contrasted with another of Icarus’s crew, Harvey, who places his survival before the success of the mission (Garland, Sunshine, 81). This clichéd theme, survival of the individual versus the greater good, is ubiquitous to space-exploration science-fiction, so how does Garland subvert the reader's expectations? Utilising a surprising twist, Garland changes the theme from self-sacrifice for the greater good to the more ethically challenging theme of sacrificing others, with Icarus’s crew members voting to murder Trey to complete the mission: “what are you asking? We weigh the life of one against the future of mankind? [Beat.] Kill him” (Garland, Sunshine, 89). This plot point innovates on existing tropes, creates conflict between the characters which heightens the reader's tension, is shocking and intellectually stimulating, which creates a more challenging and engaging story. In his introduction to the screenplay, Garland identifies atheism as one of his key thematic interests, which he explores to differing degrees over different drafts. In draft V01 (Garland, Sunshine) the antagonist Pinbacker’s motivation for stopping the protagonist is philosophical rather than religious; Garland summarised Pinbacker’s belief as, "if we save Earth now, all we’re doing is putting off this imminent horror of extinction to our great, great, great, great squared or whatever you want … grandchildren & that's an act of cowardice”” (Krauss, 00:31:29). This earlier draft also drew clearer parallels between Searle’s transformation and Pinbacker's descent into madness by comparing the visual descriptions of the characters in the screenplay’s action: “that his face is like a much-advanced version of Searle’s. The skin is ravaged, cracked, split" (Garland, Sunshine, 53), and both Searle's and Pinbacker's use of sunglasses serves as a recurring visual motif which links the characters together in the reader's mind. However, the inclusion of Searle’s death scene in the final draft (Garland, Sunshine, 87) after Pinbacker’s scenes had been substantially redrafted and the similarities between them reduced, meant that these crucial character developments and scenes lost their impact. Perhaps within the editing process, the thematic focus changed, but the plot maintained its initial direction. In the final draft, Pinbacker embodies Garland’s thematic counterpoint to atheism, religion. Pinbacker’s character has been driven mad by his spiritual awakening and is fundamentally opposed to the protagonist's dramatic need: “we can’t go to Heaven if you won’t let us die” (Garland, Sunshine, 120). Garland describes Pinbacker’s character in disturbing and graphic detail, his “skin is so sun-damaged and eaten with melanomas” (Garland, Sunshine, 99), and alludes to hellish imagery through his choice of language, describing Pinbacker as a “surreal and demonic shape” (Garland, Sunshine, 103), whilst some parts of the action are reminiscent of descriptions of Hell: “tiny flames lick on the edges of crusts of skin, that glow like coal embers, or miniature lava streams” (Garland, Sunshine, 98). Garland uses this language to illuminate his thematic point and show the destructive effects of Pinbacker’s spiritual beliefs through his carefully constructed, deliberate use of disturbing and shocking imagery. Being able to master the words on the page to evoke an image in the reader's mind is a crucial skill for any screenwriter, especially in genre writing where readers have set expectations based on literary conventions. Reading Garland’s short, sharp descriptions of action creates a visual narrative that not only stirs the readers' imagination and evokes a sense of pace and tension, but also adds subtext to the scenes. As Sunshine’s plot progresses and Searle starts to lose his sanity, his skin becomes more sunburnt, “his face a patchwork of red and peeling skin” (Garland, Sunshine, 64). Garland begins to include religious references in Searle’s dialogue: “ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust” (Garland, Sunshine, 78), and “they had an epiphany. They saw the light” (Garland, Sunshine, 78). Garland mirrors the internal changes within the character with the external changes to his appearance, and through carefully chosen dialogue he u