To be fair, Ex Machina and Annihilation were plenty dense and cryptic, too, but both films rewarded our patience with gorgeous visuals and thought-provoking insights about the intersection of humanity and technology. Devs has the visuals down pat, to be sure, but the insight is lacking. It has Garland’s signature chilly and cerebral tone, but the pacing is sluggish. (It feels at times like a two-hour movie idea that got stretched out to fill eight hours.) And while the characters in Garland’s films helped us connect to the brainy material on a human level, Devs‘ characters just aren’t sharply drawn enough to make us care.
Devs is, as one character puts it, “transcendently weird,” with enough highbrow talk about quantum computing, neuron mapping and multiverses to make your head spin. The technology on display is certainly impressive: “The Machine” does seem to be a true game-changer of unfathomable power and scope. (I’m not allowed to reveal what it actually does — which is fine, because I don’t completely understand it.) It all feels a bit like a dream, or a hallucinogenic trip, and Garland is a true master at creating a sense of wonder and awe with his jaw-dropping visual style. (Amaya’s headquarters is a tech nerd’s paradise, nestled deep in a majestic redwood forest, with sleek buildings standing alongside centuries-old trees and a towering statue of a little girl looming over all of it.) It’s almost enough just to drink in Devs‘ visual grandeur and let its far-out ideas bounce around your brain. Almost.
But the conspiracy subplot acts like an anchor, stubbornly dragging Devs‘ soaring ambitions back down to earth. Lily’s mission to find out what really happened to Sergei is hampered by heavy exposition, shadowy characters and plot twists we’ve seen before on Homeland, or 24, or a hundred other TV thrillers. Mizuno does what she can, but I’d rather spend more time at Amaya and learn more about its incredible innovations than follow another desperate character as she tumbles down another paranoid rabbit hole of puzzle-piece clues. It’s disappointing to see a series with such vast potential get shoved into a pre-fabricated TV drama template.
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: FX’s Devs offers cool technology and stunning visuals, but the plot is disappointingly cryptic and confusing.
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