Film Review: ‘Ex Machina’ leaves its viewers wondering
The idea of Man usurping the powers reserved for God (or the Gods, if you go back far enough) has always been a central theme in Western culture. The most sinful iterations of this are attempts to create life... from scratch rather than the old-fashioned fun way. Mary Shelley decked it out in scientific drag in “Frankenstein,” and the variations on her take have never stopped popping up in both horror and science fiction.
So maybe it shouldn’t seem strange that “Ex Machina” — writer Alex Garland’s directorial debut — should have so many similarities to last year’s “The Machine.” (The timing suggests that neither could have been ripped off from the other.) Both are relatively low-budget stories, set in subterranean labs where engineers try to develop genuine A.I. (artificial intelligence) with possibly sinister motivations. That may seem merely generic, but the machine/being at the center of each is a woman named Ava.
In “Ex Machina,” hotshot programmer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a weeklong trip to the gigantic, isolated estate of his mysterious employer, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), whose fabulous wealth derives from his ubiquitous search engine, Blue Book (or as the rest of us call it, Google). Nathan has built a sophisticated robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander) and wants Caleb to question her in a strangely constructed Turing Test. That is, Caleb can see her from the git-go and see that she’s built of titanium — a setup that would surely prejudice the questioner and render the test invalid.
For those with devious minds — I’m guilty — that oddity suggests some interesting possibilities. One: that Nathan is himself a machine, that Ava is misdirection, and that the real Turing Test is whether Caleb figures that out. Another: That Caleb is a machine — with implanted memories — and his performance is a sort of reverse Turing Test. Yet another: That, since we only see Ava from Caleb’s point of view, her apparent personality is in fact simply what Caleb is projecting onto her.
Without disclosing the accuracy of those ideas, let’s just say that, toward the end, Garland de-emphasizes the metaphysical concerns that have been predominant so far. Until then, almost all the dramatic action has been in the form of debate and dialogue. Finally Garland makes things more physical; violence develops, and the tone moves from an uneasy anticipation of bad things to the bad things themselves.
Maybe. “Bad things” may be how the ending appears to one person, while another thinks the “things” are not “bad” at all. A friend suggested a feminist reading, in which the film is designed as a metaphor for the emancipation of women from the men who control them and try to force their inherent identities into something the male prefers. I think Garland had those issues in mind, but that they were a theme rather than the theme. Still, there’s plenty of room for ambiguity in these matters, largely because Vikander gives such a nuanced performance.
In his breakthrough role in “Inside Llewyn Davis,” Isaac was sometimes so convincingly grating that I couldn’t imagine him in any other sort of part. But his excellent work in both “A Most Violent Year” and “The Two Faces of January” set me straight. In “Ex Machina,” he’s back in full-on irritating mode. Nathan often repeats himself, talking right over Caleb like a computer failing to parse the subtle differences between the wordings.
With all three characters, the pacing, tone and emphasis of dialogue suggests that there is more beneath the surface of the plot. At times, for instance, Caleb’s measured pauses, slow delivery, and lack of affect are more than a little reminiscent of HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).