Not that the genre has ever really gone out of style or ever will,
but the last year has seen a number of movies on artificial intelligence. Even
the upcoming Avengers: Age of
Ultron deals with evil robots
turning on their masters. We get it; the robots will all eventually kill us but
can't it be done in a way that we haven't seen before? Can't we be entertained
before the robots destroy us? Ex Machina, which marks the directorial debut by 28 Days Later, Never Let Me Go, and Sunshine writer Alex Garland, is exactly
the film we've been waiting for. A haunting and thrilling look at technology
taken to the ultimate degree, it will make you look at every other movie about
artificial intelligence in a whole new way.
Garland has become synonymous with taking
familiar stories and giving them a fresh spin, whether it is zombie flicks or
deep space sci-fi. Ex Machina may be the smartest film he's ever
done. Think about a movie like Her,
which found a man falling in love with his operating system. Ex Machina takes a similar tract, but really digs
into what the idea of an intelligent thinking machine could mean. Like people,
there would be shades of grey; there would be human weaknesses, human desires,
and even baser human traits.
The machine at the center of this story is
Ava (the lovely Alicia Vikander), a name that is deliberately a play on Adam
& Eve. Ava is a sleekly designed cybernetic creation, a body of
circuits inside a crystalline shell with a beautiful woman's face. The man who
invented her, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), is an eccentric tech genius who lives out
in the middle of nowhere in a state-of-the-art estate. As the inventor of Blue
Book, the world's top search engine, Nathan has everything he could ever want
or need. He spends his days drinking, working out, fiddling with his
inventions, and getting over hangovers. He's also the man with a plan, which we
see put into action when Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a normal-everyday programmer
at Blue Book, is chosen to fly to Nathan's estate for a getaway. But this isn't
a social call. Nathan's there to perform the "Turing Test" on Ava to
see if her personality is truly indistinguishable from a human.
Garland lays all of this out in the first
10 minutes or so, just one of many brilliant moves on his part. The rest of the
film will require your full attention because every word matters, every line
holds deeper meaning. Nathan is a strange bird; perhaps he's spent too long in isolation
but he's trying too hard to be cool. He's always lifting weights and calling
Caleb "bro". He's both polite and totally lacking in social graces.
He's also got one heck of a temper. The film is structured around Caleb's seven
sessions with Ava, and he is to give an honest opinion of her afterwards. She
proves to be shy, innocent, and curious like a child experiencing the world for
the first time. But she's also subtle and manipulative, especially when Caleb
begins to show compassion for her predicament.
While Ex
Machina works as a
tantalizing love triangle about Ava and the only two men in her life, it's also
a film that explores some big ideas. We tend to think of sentient machines in
stark black or white terms. They are either subservient to us or menacingly
against us, when the truth is that human thought encompasses so much more.
Garland also examines the formation of human sexuality by exploring Ava's
attraction to Nathan and his attraction to her. If a robot has human traits,
wouldn't that include a naturally-occurring sexual attraction? Or is it
something that needs to be determined by the inventor? Do humans choose who
they love? Or is it "programmed" by outside influences?
There are a number big questions Garland
raises, but he never takes his eye off making this an entertaining thriller.
Tension is consistently ratcheted up and the story never hits a snag, even
though it largely centers on three characters in one single location. It reminded
me a lot of the Sundance drama, Z
for Zachariah, which showed that human frailty remains the same no
matter how far into the future one goes. Ex
Machina says much the same
thing, tackling themes of loneliness, jealousy, sexual desire, and delusional
grandeur. It's also an ugly look at the ways men and women treat one another
for selfish personal gain. There's even a little bit of Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein thrown in for good measure. Although this is his first time
behind the camera, Garland keeps his camera steady and free of cheap visual
tricks. It's a simple, sleek and clean approach with impeccable placement of
character. Keep a close watch on how the actors are placed in each scene and
how it signifies who has the real power. Even the ambient, hypnotic score helps
build the suspense to an almost unbearable degree. If there's a problem it's
that Garland reveals too early that something awful is going to happen later.
We already come in suspecting it, but he could have let us wonder just a bit
longer. It takes some of the sting out of it once things truly start going bad.
He does manage to make up for it with bizarre turns that come out of nowhere,
like a surreal dance number with Nathan and another sexy femme-bot.
All of the performances are top notch,
which should be no surprise. Every character comes with deep layers requiring a
degree of nuance that every actor hits just right. Gleeson continues to make
the most from the least flashy of roles, showing us Caleb's insecurity, loneliness,
and simple human decency. Vikander's role is the toughest, as she must
transition imperceptibly from childlike virtuousness to seductive femme fatale
all while maintaining a slightly artificial demeanor. Much of the humor, and
there is plenty of it, will come from Isaac as the petulant man-child, Nathan.
Isaac has been doing such amazing work over the last couple of years that
we may be starting to take it for granted, but his performance here has to rank
as one of his best. Nathan is at times the guy we'd love to have a beer with
and someone to be terrified of.
So what does Ex Machina say about human desire to create
the perfect AI? It may be in our best interests to figure out our own problems
first before passing them on to our future robot overlords.
Rating: 4 out of 5
