Inside “Devs,” a Dreamy Silicon Valley Quantum Thriller

Homeowners of the San Francisco Bay Location– and anyone who works in tech, actually– will get a kick out of the languorous establishing shots and scene-setting of Devs, the brand-new series on Hulu from writer-director Alex Garland, premiering March 5. It’s not simply the quiet, empty bird’s-eye views of the city, some with roiling summertime fog. It’s the Brechtian contrast of gracious old buildings with homeless people in their foyers, the dive bars with thoroughly curated recycled-wood wainscoting, the high-end shuttle to Silicon Valley. (The one in the show has the name of the imaginary company it serves, Amaya, painted on the side; in reality, most are too sneaky for that.)

Amaya has a school, naturally– built around an amphitheater fixated a huge statue of a toddler, overlooking a grove of sequoias. Like Pixar’s giant Luxo light or the Tyrannosaurus rex at Google, the Brobdingnagian kiddo is an ideal symbol of the kinds of places where socially awkward geniuses stay up late and produce disruptive developments (or interfere with ingenious generations or innovate generational disruption).

Garland and team, a number of them regular collaborators, shot video around the Bay Location and a few other locations. However the heart of the show is here at a soundstage in Manchester, a huge city in the north of England that the production selected due to the fact that all the other UK soundstages big enough were occupied by Star Warses and Marvels. On the main phase, amidst canvas-backed directors’ chairs, lights, and the common Holy Trinity of Adhesion (gaffer, masking, and duct), rises, 30 feet high, a literal set piece.

Image a cube. Now subdivide each face into 9 squares with a tic-tac-toe grid, and then erase the middle square. Now do the tic-tac-toe-and-delete thing to each of the 8 staying squares on every face of the cube, but smaller. Now do it once again, infinity times. That’s a Menger sponge, a three-dimensional fractal mathematical item.

Now develop a 30- foot-tall Menger sponge, line it with pulsing LEDs, and then surround it with scalloped, gold-lined walls, and you have the Devs set. It’s a real-ish building inside, with a (nonfunctioning) bathroom, snack fridges, purpose-built metal computer system terminals, an elaborate inlaid table suggested to be a high-tech scanner, and so on. In-story, it’s the secret laboratory of Amaya’s developers division– the devs of the title– in a forest clearing, surrounded by Faraday guards and 12 feet of concrete, hovering on electro-magnetic waves inside a total vacuum. In the middle of the cube, dead center, is the point of all this buildup: a quantum computer with the nearly mystical capability to see beyond time and area.

This is all extremely Garland. His sci-fi– notably the films Ex Machina and Annihilation, and now Devs— tends to shun “engage-the-neutrino-drive!” technobabble. Rather Garland has an associate for getting zeitgeisty science ideal adequate to reinforce a grander theme. His first effort at television has his fans charging their thinking caps in anticipation.

Devs is about parallel universes, a little bit, and it also includes a minimum of 2: In one, Devs is a 1970 s-style sci-fi tech thriller, in which a lady goes searching for her missing boyfriend inside a sinister corporation. In the other, it’s a story of capitalism, free choice versus determinism, and the Big Data that manages us all. Which is good, due to the fact that those are all stories about the sort of people who like Alex Garland films. (Well, the second timeline anyway.)

Except, no, because really a lot of geeks actually do care, and besides, that’s not how Garland does things.

Working on his 2010 adaptation of Never Ever Let Me Go, based on a