The Imperiled Women of Alex Garland’s Films

It’s hard to think of a contemporary mainstream male filmmaker who consistently writes better female characters than Alex Garland. Before his directorial career began, he primarily focused on stories about men: his novel The Beach (which was adapted for the Leonardo DiCaprio film) and the screenplays to “28 Days Later,” “Sunshine” and “Dredd.” It certainly wasn’t as if he was incapable of writing women—“28 Days Later” and “Sunshine” are both excellent in this regard—but since stepping behind the camera, it’s striking how often his films have featured female leads and questions of gender equality. Even more impressive is that—except for one glaring exception (and, for the record, I think it works in that movie)—Garland’s films tend to be fairly subtle in their handling of these issues. He never stoops to reducing his women to Strong Female Characters.  Over the last decade-plus, there’s been much conversation about the Strong Female Character, Hollywood’s attempt to compensate for generations of male-driven action movies by occasionally letting a woman take the lead. Blockbusters such as “The Hunger Games” and “Wonder Woman” were encouraging signs of progress, but the trope quickly became a cliché, these types of roles slowly turning into a monolith. And audiences grew restless. As novelist and playwright Sophia McDougall put it in The New Statesman back in 2013, “What do I want instead of a Strong Female Character? … I want a wealth of complex female protagonists who can be either strong or weak or both or neither, because they are more than strength or weakness. Badass gunslingers and martial artists sure, but also interesting women who are shy and quiet and do, sometimes, put up with others’ shit because in real life there’s often no practical alternative.”  When the concept of the Strong Female Character started gaining popularity, it wasn’t necessarily meant to indicate that these protagonists had to be physically strong—just that they were layered and involving in the same way that their male counterparts were. But kicking ass soon became more important than any other characteristic. Years after Sigourney Weaver in “Aliens” demonstrated what a great Strong Female Character could look like—she even got an Oscar nomination—the dimensionality got stripped away, the Strong Female Character simplified into the lifeless “empowered” avatars we saw played by the likes of Brie Larson. Garland’s thoughtful women occasionally do shoot guns or wreck shit. “Ex Machina,” “Annihilation,” “Men” and his latest, “Civil War,” are set in very different universes in which very different types of women have to navigate worlds in which they don’t feel safe—for very different reasons. Sometimes they’re up against an alien menace. Sometimes it’s a strange stalker. Sometimes it’s the fact that American democracy is imploding. Regardless of the circumstance, for his characters to survive, they’re required to go far beyond being “strong.” Unfortunately, that’s what’s so jarring—and, ultimately, disappointing—about “Civil War”: It’s the first time Garland has viewed one of his heroines so narrowly. But before we discuss where Garland went wrong with his new film, let’s look back to what he’s done right in the past. His 2014 directorial debut, “Ex Machina,” might superficially feel like a sci-fi thriller you’ve seen many times. It’s about an arrogant tech super-genius, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), who has created a robot, Ava (Alicia Vikander), that he’s sure he controls—on cue, though, he will be disabused of this notion as his creation breaks free. But it’s the specifics that made “Ex Machina” chilling. Specifically, it was Garland’s decision to conceive Ava as shapely and desirable. To be sure, there have been several alluring female robots over the history of sci-fi—the subservient android women of “The Stepford Wives,” the idealistic Maria in “Metropolis.” But Garland was after something spikier: Adorned with Vikander’s beautiful face, “Ex-Machina”’s attractive robot was clearly the product of Nathan’s horny, megalomaniac, misogynistic mindset. (Tellingly, Nathan’s obedient personal assistant, played by Sonoya Mizuno, is also a good-looking android.) But unlike past cinematic robot beauties, Ava won’t be held in check by her male creator for long. When one of Nathan’s programmers—the bright but sweet and timid Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson)—is invited to his compound to study Ava to determine if she has achieved genuine consciousness, she quickly seduces Caleb, who falls for her. But are Ava’s feelings real? Or are they part of a scheme to escape? Garland envisioned Ava as attractive not just to concoct a prickly love story but to comment on gender inequality within a sci-fi/Frankenstein narrative. “The thing about female objectification is that it’s sort of inarguable that it happens,” Garland told RogerEbert.com. “There’s no real debate to have about it, it’s just so obvious. The film is definitely interested in aspects of that. The key