Ex Machina (2014)

Tagline:
To erase the line between man and machine is to obscure the line between men and gods.

Wide Release Date:
April 10, 2015

Directed by:
Alex Garland
Written by:
Alex Garland
Produced by:
Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich

Starring:
Domhnall Gleeson
Alicia Vikander
Oscar Isaac

PREGAME THOUGHTS

I watched the Devs miniseries and I wasn’t too impressed. This Alex Garland guy seemed like a total hack! Boo!

Then I read a lot of opinions that Garland’s first real feature film, Ex Machina, was a masterstroke of cinematic brilliance! Well, not quite, but it was apparently supposed to be a good chaser after Devs leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.

So I though, why the hell not? I like stories that brush the subject of artificial intelligence, consciousness, and the moral ramifications therein when the twain meet! So let’s give it a shot.

THE 550(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

Meet Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), who works as a computer programmer at Blue Book. The company is founded and owned by Nathan (Óscar Isaac). Well, as “luck” would have it, Caleb “wins” a week-long stay at Nathan’s remote home where he lives in isolation with a servant named Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno). Cool beans, right? Sure. Sure it is.

Nathan makes Caleb uncomfortable with his extraverted bluntness, but they are civil. Nathan tells Caleb that he has been accepted to his home for the privilege of interacting with Ava (Alicia Vikander), Nathan’s humanoid robot with artificial intelligence. Perform a Turing test. He’s excited! Yeah, in his pants.

Nice to meet you. My creator gave me big titties.

Over the course of the week, Caleb and Ava interact with one another in her locked quarters. Nathan observes through cameras. Topics of discussion include Ava’s desires to see the world. Caleb is impressed with the AI, and even starts to grow a crush on her. A crush turns to infatuation when she puts on clothes and a wig, looking exactly like the kind of woman who lonely Caleb desires. Boners are popped all around. Occasionally, Ava will cut power to her quarters (rendering the cameras useless) and, direly, will tell Caleb that Nathan is not to be trusted.

Following this, Caleb also begins to lose respect for Nathan after experiencing days worth of his excessive drinking and cruelty toward Ava and Kyoko. When Nathan informs Caleb that he intends to upgrade Ava following the Turing test, essentially killing her current personality, Caleb really starts to lose his mind. During an evening when Nathan drinks to the point of passing out, Caleb steals his keycard to gain access to the off-limits areas. He discovers security footage of Nathan treating past androids — all women — as tortured prisoners and slaves. The ever-silent Kyoko peels off part of her face, revealing to Caleb the machinery beneath. Caleb goes nuts enough to believe the possibility that he, himself, might be an android too. He slits his forearm to confirm, and he bleeds.

Caleb forms a plan to bust Ava out of the joint after telling Ava that Nathan intends to shut her down — “kill” her. He’ll get Nathan drunk, steal his keycard, reprogram the security system and open Ava’s locks. And she and Caleb will get to fall in love and die together or whatever other happy horseshit is running through his mind.

The movie then follows a tense back and forth between Caleb and Nathan where they try to prove that one was one step ahead of the other. In the end, it’s Caleb that wins. The security protocols are reprogrammed and Ava is set free. Nathan knocks Caleb out and runs out of the computer room, leaving Caleb locked in there. Kyoko and Ava meet up and form some cahoots to kill Nathan. Stab him with a big ol’ knife, causing one very dead computer genius. While Nathan dies, he is able to destroy Kyoko and rip off Ava’s arm.

Once the threat is eliminated, Ava finds old models of androids and fashions herself a new arm. Then she proceeds to outfit herself with some flesh and clothing. The audience thinks she’ll return to Caleb, but she instead leaves him locked in the room. She escapes the facility, and we end with her walking amongst the humans at a busy street intersection.

Keep an eye out for Ex Machina 2: Sex and the City.

Presumably, Caleb dies. We don’t know for sure. lol

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — General Movie Thoughts

What a fantastic movie. Great performances by all three of the main cast: Gleeson playing the lonely, slightly cringey, easily manipulated geek. Isaac as the billionaire genius tech bro. Vikander’s movements made a more plausible android than Brent Spiner. The plot progression was intense on a lowkey level, building mistrust on both sides to the point where you started to really empathize with Caleb’s situation. There was even some semi-gratuitous full-frontal nudity! I wasn’t supposed to like it because the whole point of it was to display the negative side of literal objectification, but I developed a thing for Sonoya Mizuno so how hard can you really blame me? I’m no better than Caleb!

I have been programmed to, as you humans say, “give happy endings”.

There’s more nuance to the story than “AI is going to take over the world.” Let’s go over how each character was trying to manipulate another to their advantage:

-Ava used sexuality to manipulate Caleb into helping free her from the prison Nathan created.
-Nathan used his desire for technological progress to manipulate Caleb and Ava into interacting with each other for his research.
-Caleb used his sexual desire for Ava to manipulate Nathan into the series of events that led to Ava escaping.

Who’s really the bad guy here? The movie makes you sympathize with Ava until the twist at the end, where a slight subversion tips the scales toward Caleb (who is left to die in Nathan’s facility). Never in the movie do you feel sympathetic toward Nathan, who is “the bad guy” who created and imprisoned — and killed — the artificial beings. In fact, you hate him once you learn that he’s basically taking advantage of his own intelligence by making a bunch of what he perceives to be lifelike and sophisticated sex dolls. You root for Kyoko and Ava when they kill him. I personally wouldn’t have wanted Caleb to be left behind at all, but it was necessary for Ava’s self-preservation.

I guess in the end Nathan’s the true bad guy! Hard to argue with that one too hard!

Stabby stab! Take that, nerd!

My take is that Ava, for all intents and purposes, is human. She is able to think freely, hold a conversation, have wants and desires, and use people to get what she wants. Sounds pretty human to me. I know some people who aren’t able to think freely or hold a conversation at all! But this movie is more about humans vs. AI, it’s also about men vs. women. All of Nathan’s artificial beings were women, so that speaks volumes about his own intentions. Try as he might’ve against it, Caleb fell prey to his own sexual desires and intentions. He didn’t care much about freeing Kyoko. In fact, there’s a scene where she lied naked on the bed and he walked right past her. Never gave her a second thought. His only interest was freeing Ava. Caleb’s intentions were, in the end, entirely selfish. And so were Ava’s. Self-preservation is one of the most, if not the most, basic human instinct.

However, I didn’t actually expect Ava to be completely uninterested in Caleb. Perhaps a part of her was, but I was legitimately surprised at first when she got dressed and then left him in the locked room instead of busting him out. Perfect ending, though. It left one’s first gut feeling to be “AI Bad” instead of just “Human Bad”, which I thought was brilliant.

TOPIC 2 — Turing Test

I spent some time thinking about putting myself in Caleb’s position. How would I perform the Turing test? What would I do if I sensed that a conscious robot was crushing on me? Man, that’s a wild thought experiment.

First of all, it’s sort of unfair out the gate because Caleb and I have the same taste in women. If I were single and 26 there’s no doubt in my mind that I would’ve fallen into the same goddamn trap. I admit it, I’m not ashamed. Dressing up like Twiggy? I would’ve been powerless! And it would’ve hurt me profoundly to learn, in the end, that I was taken advantage of. It’s hard for me not to sympathize with Caleb, and perhaps that’s a learning experience for me.

I feel that knowing you’re performing a Turing test biases yourself in the first place. Try as you might, if you were going into a conversation knowing you’re talking to AI, you’re going to treat that entity as AI instead of a human being. You’re not going to approach it with as much social grace and tact that proper etiquette dictates when you meet someone new. You’re gonna be like “DO YOU KNOW YOUR OWN NAME?” and “DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW?”

Or, in some cases, “DO YOU WANT TO TEAR UP THE DANCE FLOOR?”

I would make an honest effort to treat the AI as if it were a human being I haven’t met yet, which means I would be incredibly socially awkward about it and I would be looking forward to when I can get out of the conversation! Wish I were kidding. Thank you for your time.

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

Director Alex Garland has described the future presented in the film as “ten minutes from now,” meaning, “If somebody like Google or Apple announced tomorrow that they had made Ava, we would all be surprised, but we wouldn’t be that surprised.”
Director Alex Garland was also heard to say “If Google or Apple created a AI sex slave, we would all fuck it, but we wouldn’t fuck it that hard.”

Even though the movie stars famous Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, the movie was never shown in regular Swedish cinemas. The cause of this was said to be a lack of quality and not enough potential for screenings.
Marketers were like “HEY, THIS WOMAN IS SWEDISH, GUYS! SHE’S JUST LIKE YOU!” but the Swedish population was too busy eating their pickled herring plates and shopping at IKEA to give a damn about some British guy’s medium-budget movie.

“Wink.”

Throughout the film, the colors red, blue, and green are prominently displayed in each scene (the green forest, the red brick hallway, the keypad’s red and blue functions, etc.) This is a nod to the RGB color model, which is used to display images in electronic systems, such as computers. Ava, of course, being the main computer in the film.
Fun fact: The movie makes extensive use of the three primary colors of light, as well as several other mixtures of light. Ava, of course, is a robot. Connect the dots yourself.

Bonus photo of Nathan and his luscious beard. You just wanna run your fingers through it, don’t ya?

Elina Alminas’s debut.
Who?

*checks Wikipedia*

Yeah, I don’t know. She must have been one of the naked robots in the closet. For her involvement in the film, she was likely paid in cookies.

In the end, Ava Session 7 appears on screen even though Caleb isn’t administering the Turing test and Nathan is already dead. This may suggest that Ava was testing the two of them the entire time.
THE TESTERS HAVE BECOME THE TESTES! That’s a joke about balls. Thank you again for your time.