Culture, Sports, Writing…or whatever
Ex Machina is a movie so good it has seeped into my dreams. I understand I’m a weird guy and my dreams can subsequently skew strange, but this time my subconscious disturbed awake me.
I had read a recent profile of Writer-Director Alex Garland, responsible for Ex Machina. He seemed an interesting guy to interview. My restful mind thought so, too. So I’m dreaming this scenario of interviewing the guy, going deep on human appearances and fallacies of love’s trust and trust’s love, and I leave him briefly to grab us beers. When I return, he’s erased our interview’s recordings and destroyed my notes. Everything we had built together gone. And he’s transformed into Oscar Isaac, who explained why “it had to be done.” My memory trails off from there.
Weird dream.
But it’s not an all together surprising one, considering Ex Machina. Let’s rewind.
Ex Machina follows Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson), a programmer at monolithic, Google-esque Bluebook. He wins a raffle to work exclusively with Bluebook’s creator at a remote, exotic location kept as secretive as any proper we’re-building-something-maybe-we-shouldn’t organization. Caleb meets Isaac’s Nathan Bateman (a last name I don’t believe to be coincidental), who’s quirky, urbane, and parties as hard as he works. Nathan informs Caleb what he’s been working on: true artificial intelligence.
Caleb’s job: Enact a Turing Test to qualify if Ava, Nathan’s machine, exhibits indistinguishable human behavior. Premise set, the movie falls into a fantastical rabbit hole of its own design. Ava, played by Alicia Vikander, is not a typical robot. She is sexy and curious, a creature as willing to listen and understand Caleb as she is ready to explore her emotions and thoughts. As the test sessions progress, she discloses her human desires to Caleb. She wants to go on a date with him. She does not wish to die. And, primarily, she needs to escape, to leave behind the shadows of Nathan’s cave and see the moon, the stars, the sun.
A sense of suspicion envelops Nathan. Something’s going on. He hides parts of himself and his lab to Caleb. Ava informs Caleb not to trust Nathan. Then there’s Nathan’s servant, Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), eerie-pretty and non-responsive to Nathan’s perpetual chiding and berating. Don’t worry, a phrase Nathan oft repeats, she doesn’t know English. She can’t understand us.
It seems, writing this and reading it over again, that we should root against Nathan. Loathe him. Only I don’t. Even when Caleb discovers tapes of previous A.I. creatures and Nathan’s testing of them, even when Caleb finds their lifeless bodies in Nathan’s room displayed like Tony Stark’s various Iron Man prototypes, even when he dickishly exposes Caleb’s plan to launch Ava’s escape, I find him infectiously amusing.
It’s credit to Isaac, who fills the screen any time he’s present. Nathan’s equal parts cool-jock and mad science genius like Robert Downey Jr.’s Stark, but geekier and his predilection for attention and adoration replaced by booze. More specifically, Isaac’s Nathan feels archetypal and therefore knowable/connectable, but also not derivative.
Paired with Vikander’s delightful Ava, their performances anchor Ex Machina’s more harrowing questions: What’s behind an appearance? Is human affection always selfishly motivated? Is artificial intelligence a feat worth achieving? Haunting of all: Why do we trust anyone, human or machine? Following Ex Machina’s ending, you can almost hear Tina Turner singing Caleb off, “What’s love but a secondhand emotion.”
Ex Machina as a title looks important. It seemingly hints at “deus ex machina,” a common device in Greek tragedy to resolve the plot. You might lean toward Garland toying with the literal Latin definition in his movie: God out of the machine. He puts it right in the film. Caleb calls Nathan a God early on then later, their relationship fraying, evokes J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
And excuse me I’m about to really nerd out, but “ex” has multiple Latin definitions: as a result of, from within, on account of. Each focusing the action to the object at hand, which in this case is “machine.” Ex Machina points to an intensive question then: What comes from the machine?
It’s not God. Garland rejects the notion, loping it off his title and murdering the man who plays God in his film. What we get is more terrifying in a way: Something that resembles a human in every possible way existing as a higher life form than even us. An appearance, perfectly constructed, sprung out of a machine. So much so that no one can tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t.*
*I hear the transparent question begged here: Isn’t this also what social media and the Internet writ large does? I’m wont to go there with this film, though.
The dark humor of Ex Machina lies with Caleb although I have slight problems with Caleb as a character. Gleeson’s nerd-guy earnest awkwardness needs some serious turning down, even though it’s supposed to belie the movie’s plot twist. He’s not clever enough to pull one on Nathan…oh my goodness, he did! Please.
But Caleb’s the person who unlocks Ava in multiple ways. He taps into her emotions, grants her access to free herself, believes in her. When it’s time for Ava to return the favor, she leaves him for rot, trapped. The one person who saw her how she viewed herself and she doesn’t even look back when he cries her name. Maybe I shouldn’t be laughing at the thought, but I can’t help myself.
I mean, was Caleb’s love truly genuine? Nathan reveals he constructed Ava to fit Caleb’s precise pornography search engine profile. In many ways, she was made for him. And how does Ava answer his adoration? She uses him to advance her position to achieve unbinding capital-F Freedom. I’d call it the most incarnate human action in the whole film.
[a] millennial reservations 