Fertile Ground in Hostile Lands
Authors: Bruce Iain 
Published: October 2024

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 uses religious imagery to build tension for the reader by creating connotations of death (‘ashes to ashes’) as the crew enters the abandoned Icarus 1, and revelations (‘epiphany’) as they discover the Icarus 1’s dead crew.
In the final draft, religion is only explicitly referenced in dialogue in the final act. If Sunshine is meant to be about mankind's inclination to misunderstand natural forces as divine (Garland, Sunshine, vii), the denouement needs to communicate this more explicitly; Pinbacker's arguments are never challenged by the characters through dialogue or discourse, which is a missed opportunity for Garland to consolidate his theme. Garland admits that Sunshine’s themes weren’t communicated clearly to the viewer: “the film in that respect definitely failed, it was a wake-up call for me to start working a bit harder” (Krauss, 00:33:26); and is candid that theme and storyline in Sunshine diverged (Ashkanani et al.) and his attempts to fix the issues weren’t rigorous enough. Sunshine is a fascinating screenplay: Garland masters his tools and techniques to build a compelling and challenging emotional and intellectual world, populated by interesting characters with clear dramatic needs; however, the final act feels thematically disjointed from Sunshine’s first 2 acts, which never reference Garland’s religious theme in dialogue or plot.
In Annihilation, Garland wanted to explore the theme of self-destruction: “it was about the ways in which people are self-destructive, the sort of hidden ways, and the obvious ways, and why it is that all of us are in some ways self-destructive” (Fennessey, 00:07:18). Annihilation’s concept provides ample opportunity for Garland to explore this theme, as protagonist Lena travels into the story's dangerous setting 'Area X' to discover why her husband went missing.
Garland uses Annihilation’s setting, ‘Area X’, a stretch of coastline where everything is mysteriously mutating, to show the theme of self-destruction through the visual narrative; he uses thematic patterning and graphic medical language to describe a disease-like growth in Area X: “fat mounds of moss, flourishing like petri dish cultures” (Garland, Annihilation, 65), it first appears on the trees, then buildings, before the characters find a body from which “brightly coloured lichen tumors” (Garland, Annihilation, 78) have exploded. Kane’s team is revealed to have imploded in a flashback scene which Garland describes in the visual narrative with disturbing body-horror imagery (Garland, Annihilation, 72-75), heightening the suspense and amplifying the reader's revulsion through its graphic imagery. Garland cleverly uses his setting to externalise his theme of change, both through the horrific action within the scenes, his descriptions of the dilapidated dwellings, or the surreal imagery of the inhabitants turned into topiary; Garland’s use of his visual narrative to reinforce his theme makes Annihilation much more cohesive than Sunshine.
Garland structures his story as a non-linear narrative, using expositional flashbacks to reveal Lena and Kane’s relationship, and that Lena was having an affair before Kane's disappearance (Garland, Annihilation, 103-106); withholding this from the reader until the end of act 2 causes them to reappraise the story, and the shock of the moment heightens the tension, while also developing Lena’s character, providing us with a greater understanding of both Lena and Kane’s decisions to enter Area X, building empathy and pathos. Garland uses expositional dialogue to reveal the affair is long-standing: “it's not exactly the first time I’ve been in your bed, or you in mine. Whenever he goes away, we find ourselves right here” (Garland, Annihilation, 104). Garland uses this subplot to pull his theme of self-destruction into sharp focus: his protagonist is self-sabotaging her marriage; her search for why her husband didn't return to her now becomes allegorical. Although the film’s plot is about a journey into an infected alien wilderness, it could also be read as a story about a faithless wife trying to discover if her husband left her because he had uncovered the truth. Garland’s stories often feel allegorical, particularly Annihilation, which weaves theme into the setting, subtext, plot, and character.
In the surreal resolution of the final act, Lena confronts her alien doppelgänger (revealing Garland's recurring interest in the subconscious). On a subtextual level she has found that the destructive alien force in her life and marriage is herself. Terminally ill Ventress undergoes a horrific physical transformation in the climactic scene, which reflects her own body's cancerous self-destruction: “it will grow until it encompasses everything. Our bodies and minds will be fragmented into their smallest parts” (Garland, Annihilation, 128); whereas the passive Radek simply vanishes rather than confront the truth (Garland, Annihilation, 119), Garland inferring that she has become part of the scenery of Area X. Garland's theme becomes explicit in the plot.
Garland structures his plot as a circular narrative. In the final scenes, Lena returns to where the story began at the Southern Reach, changed by her experiences, and shares her new understanding of the nature of the shimmer and Garland’s perspective on the theme of self-destruction. “It wasn’t destroying. It was changing everything. It was making something new” (Garland, Annihilation, 139). Garland provides the reader and characters with a cathartic moment as Lena and Kane are reunited and admit they’re not who they seem. Using concisely written action, Garland reveals the shimmer in both their eyes (Annihilation, 140), the visual motif of change within his screenplay. Pointedly, Kane's doppelgänger asks his wife: “are you Lena?” (Garland, Annihilation, 140). Garland exits the scene early, leaving the story's resolution open to interpretation to heighten the suspense and ensure the screenplay ends with this question present in the reader's mind.
A decade after plot, theme, and characters diverged in Sunshine, Garland masterfully weaves them together to build an engaging, synergistic, and thematically coherent world in his “hallucinogenic, atmosphere piece” (Fennessey, 00:03:51) Annihilation. Putting his thematic issue at the heart of his character's dramatic needs, plot and setting allowed Garland to immerse the reader in his musings on the question of why ordinary people self-destruct. Garland’s evolving approach to world-building demonstrates that, to build new emotional and intellectual story worlds, screenwriters must structure plot around a clear thematic issue too, and master craft and techniques to interlink setting, characters, dramatic need, visual and auditory narratives.
Javier Grillo Marxuach argues: “when creating a world, your most important question is, quite simply … ’What is my most important question?’”. In Sunshine, Alex Garland wrote a taut science-fiction adventure which asked too many questions and arguably failed to answer any satisfactorily. In Annihilation, a film singularly about self-destruction, Garland demonstrates a mastery of his craft in world-building and answers that most important question.
References
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———. Sunshine. London: Faber and Faber. 2007.
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