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Devs Review: Alex Garland Delivers A Riveting, Sometimes Bumpy Tech Thriller
FX on Hulu is finally a thing and the convergence of the award-magnet cable network and streaming service for TV lovers is getting a big push with the premiere of Devs, the television debut of author, screenwriter, and director Alex Garland. It’s a tech-world thriller that explores the notion of consumers’ cult-like devotion to brand names, and the equally cult-like existence led by some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. But in exploring the various faults in the culture surrounding Big Tech, primarily through the fictional company Amaya, headed up by Nick Offerman’s raw greens-munching tech guru and Amaya CEO, Forest, Garland also introduces a wild, not-so hypothetical variable that makes these companies so lucrative and attractive in the first place: the creation of technology that has the power to reshape the lives of every human on the planet.
Critics have been sworn to secrecy over what, exactly, is going on at Devs, the secretive wing of Amaya, but rest assured, its reveal comes early enough in the series that it effectively sets the course for the rest of the eight-episode series, all of which were written and directed by Garland. The only problem is the effectiveness of Amaya’s secret tech is such that it renders the series’ secondary plot, that of coder Lily Chan (Sonoya Mizuno), investigating the suspicious disappearance of her boyfriend, Sergei (Karl Glusman), a tad unnecessary. That’s in part because Garland has crafted a thoroughly compelling story around Amaya, Forest, and his assistant Katie (Alison Pill), and their earth-shattering discovery through Devs, and also due in part to certain shortcomings in Mizuno’s performance and character, shortcomings that result in the series ultimately being somewhat uneven.
It’s to Garland’s credit, however, that Devs is able to overcome those limitations, often by teasing out details of what Devs is and what it can do, and by digging deeper into both some heady theoretical quantum mechanics and into the complicated lives of Forest and Katie, as well as Amaya’s head of security, Kenton (Zach Grenier). Those elements become the driving force of the series, and they even come with a terrific supporting cast that includes Cailee Spaney as Lyndon and Stephen McKinley Henderson as Stewart, two coders who’ve been with Devs from the beginning, and whose character threads give the series more than enough to work with that the introduction of the thriller aspect becomes even more questionable.
It’s understandable why Garland would want to introduce the thriller component; it’s gripping enough to appeal to that portion of the audience who might otherwise turn their nose up at the idea of spending eight hours poking around the possibilities and hazards of quantum mechanics. That’s especially true when the potential would forever change humankind’s relationship to the idea of free will, not to mention the far more relatable concern of tech companies turning user data into profit and ending the notion of privacy forever. So, in a sense, Garland is covering his bases, making sure that Devs is a series that can appeal to a wider audience than, say, Annihilation or even Ex Machina.
In doing so, Garland ensures Devs has enough runway for its two parallel plots to eventually converge, and in doing so, also creates an unusual sort of tension, wherein what Forest and the Devs team have discovered is so compelling, and presented to the audience in such an enthralling way, that you can’t help but want to see them come out on top. That’s not entirely true across the board, as Forest and Kenton—the head of security in particular—get up to some truly nasty stuff throughout the series’ run, but it is true enough that part of you may want to see Forest’s story, and that of his Amaya Devs department play out in a more unconventional manner.
That may also be due to the aforementioned drawbacks of Mizuno’s performance as Lily, which is so often enervated that her scenes begin to rely too much on whomever she’s sharing them with. Thankfully, Garland places her opposite Offerman, Glusman, or Jin Ha, as Lily’s ex-boyfriend, Jamie, often enough to help carry things along. The consequence, then, is that Devs tends to tilt more in the favor of its theoretical explorations than its attempts to join the ranks of paranoid thrillers like The Conversation or The Parallax View or Klute, to name a few. Instead, the series works much better as an investigation of where the obsession with big tech may take humankind, and how it will undoubtedly shape the future and reshape our understanding of the past. Those are indeed some heady ideas, and they also seem to be where Devs is most comfortable.
Devs premieres Thursday, February 5 @10pm on FX and Hulu.
