Ex Machina

Science fiction movies often focus on the human race’s relationship with technology – what we might do with it and what it might do to us as it advances and becomes more and more an inherent part of our existence. Of course, some of the most memorable sci fi movies show how that human/technology relationship can turn really dysfunctional – Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and its dispassionate killer artificial intelligence HAL come to mind. Ridley Scott’s Alien and Blade Runner are right up there too. There’s always an unsettling “What if” implied in films like that, and as we hand over more and  more of our lives and agency to smart phones, GPS, social media, and search engines, that “What if” becomes increasingly relevant. 

This week’s film, one you might have missed when it was in theaters, is Alex Garland’s Ex Machina. Garland, the screenwriter of provocative sci fi movies like 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go, and Dredd, debuts as a director here working from his own script. 

Ex Machina takes place in a very near future. Donal Gleason plays Caleb, a talented but solitary programmer working for Blueblook, the world’s largest search engine. Caleb wins a company-wide lottery to spend a week with Nathan Bateman, Bluebook’s brilliant, reclusive founder, played by Oscar Isaac. Imagine the wealth, intelligence, ambition, and ruthlessness of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg combined into one person and that’s Bateman. When Caleb arrives at Nathan’s beautiful, half-subterranean estate, he discovers he’s not there just to hang out and drink beer with the boss. Nathan tells him he’s been selected to participate in a Turing test. That is to say that Nathan has created an artificial intelligence and he wants Caleb to see if he can tell whether the AI is human or not.

Nathan’s AI is a very human-seeming female robot named Ava played by Alicia Vikander. She has a human face, hands, and feet, and the rest of her is very obviously mechanical with circuits, wires, and machinery visible through her skin. Nathan developed her personality and behaviors by secretly harvesting the questions and searches entered by billions of Bluebook users. By seeing what people search for and how they search, he programmed Ava to simulate human thought.

In series of sessions, Caleb interviews Ava in her quarters while he sits in a glass box like an observation deck in a tiger cage. The more the two of them talk, the more charmed he becomes. Unexpected power outages at Nathan’s house cut the surveillance cameras, and in those moments of not being observed, Caleb discovers that Ava is causing the outages so she can tell him that Nathan is a liar and is not to be trusted.

 

Between sessions, Caleb and Nathan explore the woods, mountains, and waterfalls around the house and talk about what makes someone really human. In these scenes, two things happen: we get a good look at the Norwegian setting for the exteriors of the film which are stunning. More movies need to be filmed in Norway, I think. But we also get a longer glimpse into Nathan’s character and see what a prickly, unsettling, unpredictable person he is. His mentality about developing such a human-like AI is. “Hey, someone’s going to do it, so why not me?” The film doesn’t club viewers over the head with it, but it isn’t hard to make the connection between Nathan and the progress-at-all-costs-us-versus-them mentality of modern technology capitalism.

Caleb decides that Ava is human and that he wants to help her escape from what he sees as Nathan’s abuse and captivity. I won’t spoil what happens from there because I think you should see the film, but suffice it to say that, appropriately enough in a movie about artificial intelligence, not everything is as it seems.

Ex Machina is the kind of movie you want to talk about when it’s over. Is it a commentary on the sexualization and commodification of the female body? A cautionary tale about Internet privacy? A modern Frankenstein? A 21^st century Icarus? It’s a worthwhile movie that produces so many possibilities. It’s not a raygun and rocketship sci fi for kids. It’s an occasionally unsettling, complex adult fable and I recommend it.