Beastly Reviews: Ex Machina
Straight guys need to stop falling in love with robots.
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 shocking 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. But overall, 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, plus an alarming conspiracy theory behind search engines and smartphones, but fails to deliver much in the way of an emotional punch. Its tone is predictably tense and grim. (The lightness of Her is, in hindsight, what spared it from being another dark robot warning.)
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). He 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, as we expect, 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, or perhaps the robot Ava herself (itself?). We know something is up but 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 spineless everyman who simply works to tell the audience how they should react to things.
The film wants to be a love story, I think, but Dohnall Gleeson's Caleb is not interesting or likeable enough to be a leading man, and Ava is just a recognizable actress with CGI robot skin. We're never faced with uncanny valley ick, which feels to me like a miss. Oscar Isaac's Nathan leads the movie with a creepy and understated performance, but he's still just another young evil genius — a familiar villain.
If the film didn't have such a knockout ending, 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 behavior can ever truly feel human emotions or simply mimic them — and whether or not a real person would 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 emotion. 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 are lives are soon to be impacted by robots and algorithms. Movie-goers will leave the theater simply saying, "Yeah, robots are bad. Definitely." Bad, maybe, but they're coming.
Love, Beastly
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