I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.
This is Beastly Reviews, where I write about films that made me feel something.
These posts are free to read. Subscribe to unlock essays, advice, and more personal work.
This movie was a mind fuck. Last year's Her used robots to explore what love might look like in humanity's tech-laced future. Ex Machina attempts the same, but with a more ominous tone and shock ending, the film's lasting sentiment about the future is closer to horror.
Like Her, it attempts a psychological experiment on the audience, and rather than falling in line as a dire warning about robots (something we've seen a lot lately), it's a bit more nuanced. And it's heartless—in more ways than one.
Written and directed by Alex Garland (28 Days Later), Ex Machina presents a beautiful robot girl and all the creepy sci-fi elements we like (fake skin getting peeled off, half-built robot faces, see-through limbs), plus an alarming conspiracy theory behind search engines and smartphones, but fails to deliver much in the way of emotional punch. Its tone is tense and grim. (The lightness of Her is, in hindsight, what spared it from being another dark, brooding robot flick.)
Ex Machina was filmed at the beautiful Juvet Landscape Hotel in Norway, and starts nicely. Mild-mannered programmer Caleb (Dohnall Gleeson) wins a contest at work and is invited to a mountain retreat with the CEO of his company, the ruggedly handsome tech genius Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Nathan reveals his big secret: he has created the world's first AI. We meet Ava (Alicia Vikander), presumably the world's first robot. She has an unfinished robot body, but her face is complete and lovely. Caleb predictably falls in love with her.
Ex Machina progresses with menacing stillness. We get the sense that Caleb is himself part of a larger experiment, and we expect Nathan is pulling the strings—creepy, intense Nathan, with his random dance breaks and menacing stare—or perhaps the robot Ava herself (itself?). We know something is up, but we can't place our finger on it. Poor Caleb is mostly an awkward, bumbling dope with a heart of gold for most of the film, a noodly everyman who exists to tell the audience how they should react to things. He’s a wuss, a well-meaning nerd, a pawn…and not altogether likeable.
The film wants to be a love story, I think, but Dohnall Gleeson's Caleb is not interesting enough to be a leading man, and Ava is just a recognisable actress with CGI robot skin. We're never faced with uncanny valley ick, which feels to me like a miss. Oscar Isaac's Nathan really leads the movie with a menacing and understated performance.
If the film didn't have such a knockout ending, I think it would fail. With its devastating finale, it becomes a thriller mind-fuck on the question of whether or not a very smart machine that observes human behaviour can ever truly feel human emotions or just mimic them, and whether or not a real person would ever be able to tell the difference. It's an interesting philosophical question, but the robot seems arbitrary; we can ask the same question about actual humans. If someone genuinely feels love or mimics it, would you know? Would you care?
It might be an uncomfortable question, one we may reasonably ask as AI increasingly knows us better. Already, AI programs can predict human choices online with alarming accuracy. Can we program compassion? If we're unable to program authentic love in real humans, how can we program it in robots? It's sort of like the debate around solipsism: The external world may be an illusion, a product of the senses—a lie—but since you can't tell either way, does it matter?
Ex Machina is unnerving and shockingly violent, with a few twists you probably won't see coming, but what it delivers on cold edginess, it lacks in emotional heft. It's just a thriller. We never connect to the characters. The performances—including Alicia Vikander's Ava—are not especially memorable. It won't really make audiences think about the real ways our lives are soon to be impacted by robots and algorithms. Movie-goers will leave the theatre simply saying, "Yeah, robots are bad. Definitely." Bad, maybe, but they're coming.
Love, Beastly