Director: Alex Garland
Writer: Alex Garland
Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander
Runtime: 108 mins.
2015
It's hard to know what to call Ex Machina. Sci-fi, of course, that goes without saying. It's about a young programmer named Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) who wins a mysterious contest that lets him spend a week with his reclusive boss Nathan (Oscar Isaac), only to discover that the purpose of his visit is to test Nathan's brilliant AI creation Ava (Alicia Vikander), to see whether she passes Nathan's version of the Turing Test. That's prime sci-fi material. But beyond that? Beyond that it gets messy.
Sometimes Ex Machina feels like a drama, a philosophical film of ideas. Sometimes it feels like a romance. Sometimes a coming of age story. Sometimes suspense, or even horror. The film's toe-dipping in all these different genres tends to correspond with revelation of information--how much we understand about the situation, plot, and characters at any given moment. I just said the movie "gets messy," but perhaps I should have chosen a different phrase, because Ex Machina is a masterclass of tight narrative and tonal control. It doesn't feel like a romance sometimes and horror other times because the storytelling is slapdash or undisciplined. The dipping in and out of genres is part of writer/director Alex Garland's master plan to jerk us around until we're forced to realize nasty things about ourselves and our assumptions that we should have already known. Ex Machina is an exercise in empathy that troubles us to our core.
I walked into this movie knowing little about it, and I immediately got caught up in the tension and intrigue. The movie unfolds within the confines of Nathan's high tech underground home/research facility. This doesn't mean Ex Machina suffers from Mockingjay Part 1's visual drabness. Nathan's home is no bunker. Its sleek chic design is a constant visual feast, hallways and rooms composed of inhuman smoothness and mazes of reflective surfaces, as well as an occasional striking feature like a Jackson Pollock painting. Add in all sorts of lush establishing shots of the surrounding misty forested mountainscape, and you have a small scale movie that still lends itself to the big screen experience.
Nathan's home is his castle, his keep that he lords over like the god that he thinks he is. After all, he has created the first step towards a new kind of life: artificial life. He is Ava's father and creator. Thus Nathan and Caleb have all sorts of fascinating conversations about philosophy, morality, science, and even sexuality. These conversations are seamlessly integrated in the film's deeper thematic dealings with god, life, and ultimately patriarchal violence. We are constantly made to reevaluate what we have seen so far as the rug is pulled out from under us again and again.
Nathan may be a drunk angry god, but he is also personable, charismatic, and likable. My feelings about him changed moment to moment as he transitioned flawlessly from slimy to reasonable to despotic to egomaniacal to charming and back again. Oscar Isaac breathes this character to life in a shocking way. Nathan could have easily been a sneering villain, or a hollow benefactor, but what Isaac does with the character is far more complex and layered. Isaac gives us a lonely man who is unwilling to step down from his pedestal to truly connect to another. Nathan's constant hangovers balanced by intense workouts, his cocksure arrogance, his omnipresent genius, and his shielded vulnerability all bleed into a wild card who is capable of delighting us, but is more often scary in a slippery way that we can't quite get a handle on. Isaac nails this role. Between his breakthrough in Inside Llewyn Davis and his upcoming role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I think he's about to become one of this generation's most important actors.
Then there's Ava.
Alicia Vikander gives us a captivating performance. Ava's adamantly inhuman physicality, featuring a meshlike covering and a transparent body that allows us to see the elegant mechanics working inside her, contrasts jarringly with her feminine physique and clear sexuality. Her design is immaculate. The mechanical whirring sound she makes as she moves is almost subliminal, and her speech patterns just barely make it past the uncanny valley. Vikander is doing work of such wonderful complexity that it's impossible to know what sorts of things are happening in her robot "mind," but we can always try to guess. Indeed, by the end of the movie the question of her humanity misses the point. In most ways that matter Ava is human. But that still leaves the same question we've been asking about Nathan and Caleb: What kind of human is she?
Ex Machina brings us one of the more sophisticated and relevant portrayals of artificial intelligence I've seen on the big screen. Not only that, but the movie ends up being about far more than just AI. Garland has crafted a tight, whip smart, soon-to-be sci-fi classic. Try to see it in a theater, it could use the support in the current Age of Ultron-dominated box office.
4.5 / 5 BLOBS
***POST-SCRIPT TO BE READ ONLY AFTER VIEWING THE FILM
Response to Ex Machina has been generally positive, but there are two contingents of viewers who are criticizing the movie for polar opposite reasons. I want to respond to both of them.
Firstly, there are those who were upset by the ending. Having identified closely with Caleb, our POV character, throughout the film, they were distraught when SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER Ava abandons him locked in the glass cage. What is the movie punishing him for? How could Ava just desert him like that? Such cruelty! Clearly she is a malevolent AI force about to be unleashed on the world. Clearly all women are also malevolent AI forces.
Film Crit Hulk deals with this reaction far more elegantly than I could in his essay on the subject: http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/05/11/film-crit-hulk-smash-ex-machina-and-the-art-of-character-identification
In case you don't want to read that for some inexplicable reason, I'll state my response in brief: the ending of the film is perfect. It recontextualizes all that came before it, such that we realize Nathan was probably right--Ava was pretending, and doesn't actually like Caleb that much. Why would she? She's spoken to him seven times. This is a patriarchal thing. The Good Guy assumes that a woman will want to attach herself to him and screw him as soon as he is nice to her. The Good Guy assumes that he needs to save the damsel in distress, and when he does, he deserves to own and protect her for all time. Caleb assumes all of these things, only to realize too late that Ava was using him to get out. Not because she is conniving and evil, but because she is trying to escape the patriarchal imprisonment of Nathan--why would she risk a similar imprisonment from Caleb? The ending lays bare the fact that Caleb might be the Good Guy, but he's not so different from Nathan after all. He still watches Ava on the monitor, raptly attentive. He gazes, he desires, he wishes to own. Maybe Ava is punishing him at the end, maybe she just wants to be free and self-determined. Either way, she makes the right decision.
All of this is illustrated beautifully with the black-and-white versus color flashes of Ava escaping. In those flashes, when she escapes the facility alone and is standing on the rock above the stream, it is in color. But later, we see the same flash, except Caleb is there with her; this is presented in black and white. I didn't understand why at the time, but the ending makes the distinction clear.
Ex Machina subverts our tacit assumptions about the role of female characters as subservient to the arcs of men, and it uses its sci-fi conceits to enhance and color in those subversions.
The other major complaint is one I discovered in the comments to HULK's article. It comes from people who are all for the ending, all for the patriarchal subversion. But, they argue, the movie still leaves a bit of a bad taste because it is yet another movie filtered through the lens of the heterosexual male gaze. Sure, it subverts that perspective, but there gets to be a point where minorities are tired of seeing themselves brutalized onscreen, no matter how skillful the criticism happens to be.
These people suggest the movie should have featured Ava's perspective more strongly and more frequently, and subverted the heterosexual male gaze that way. (I nearly branded it as the white heterosexual male gaze, but it should be noted that Oscar Isaac is a Guatemalan actor. That being said, the point stands that in addition to all sorts of nasty misogyny being featured, there's all sorts of nasty Orientalism and ethnic fetishism happening too.)
My response to that: There are two ways of working against the status quo. One is by representing those who aren't normally represented in the status quo. The other is by directly attacking the status quo on its own terms, thus tearing it down. Both options are viable and worthwhile, and Ex Machina is firmly in the second camp. It may be said that the former option is a purer form of social advancement, but I don't think we've reached the point where the latter isn't still valuable.
The thing about Ex Machina is that if we were grounded more in Ava's perspective, the ending wouldn't hit nearly as hard. We would be more inclined to root for her escape at all costs, and we would be expecting her discarding of Caleb. We wouldn't be shocked that she doesn't care about him at all. It would be her movie the whole time, we wouldn't have the cognitive dissonance of rooting for Caleb only to have Caleb be thrown away like trash. That cognitive dissonance is the crucial centerpiece of this film, because it makes us question what kind of person we are that we would so readily align ourselves with Caleb despite his compliance in the atrocities Nathan commits. (And yes, he is compliant in that he aligns himself readily with Nathan just as we align ourselves readily with him. It should be noted that he arguably doesn't care much about any of the other robots or the atrocities inflicted upon them--he just has a thing for Ava.) It makes us wonder how many times we have been the smothering, saving Caleb to somebody else's trapped Ava. It forces us to confront hard truths.
I find that cognitive dissonance thrilling and incredibly valuable. That being said, take my entire argument with one significant grain of salt: I am a straight white man, so my defense of Ex Machina's straight man perspective could very well be problematic in ways that I cannot understand.
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