With faint whiffs of Frankenstein, 2001 and even the "betcha didn't see that coming" of The Sixth Sense, Ex Machina, which opens Friday, weaves an engaging and talky tale of robot emancipation and human avarice.
It's rooted in technology, robotics and basic human emotion, using visual tropes to trick us into thinking we know where this is all going.
The movie is laced with sardonic wit and a handful of outright laughs, but at its core it's a morality play about humanity and how, when robots do achieve sentience, they may act exactly as humans do.
This is not always a good thing.
Produced by Universal, Ex Machina is, at times, sumptuous film. The Norwegian backdrop, with its snow and ice covered peaks, telegraphs both the remote location and the singularity of each character in what is, essentially, a three character play.
The story is sketched simply and in broad strokes. Writer, director Alex Garland chooses not to spell everything out. We don’t know the year, location or anything that’s led up to the 1 hour 50 minute rumination on artificial intelligence and our need to project our own feelings on to other beings, living or not. In the film, it’s often the numerous moments of utter silence that help fill in the gaps.
When Domhnall Gleeson (Caleb) wins a one week project with his company's rich, eccentric and genius boss Oscar Isaac (Nathan), he is quickly whisked away to the CEOs remote compound where an incredible AI project is well under way. That project, Ava, played with robotic-tick perfection by Alicia Vikander (top-notch special effects also help sell the robot illusion), is almost immediately smitten with Gleeson, whose job it is to find out if Ava can pass the Turing Test and, during a QA, convince Gleeson she's human or at least self-aware.
It doesn't give too much away to say she does.
There is, though, a disturbing bent to this film. You're seeing much of it through the eyes of Gleeson, but who sits at the center of it all? In a discussion after a special screening hosted by Mashable's MashFlix digital film club and the film’s producers, Garland called Ava the protagonist of the film. It is not a cautionary AI tale at all, he insisted. In fact, he looks forward to the emergence of true AI’s. Garland interviewed numerous robotics and AI experts as he was writing the script, sending it to one and asking him, he told the audience, to essentially call bullshit on it. When he screened the film for the scientists, they enjoyed it, which made sense to Garland as many of their ideas were in the film.
.@ExMachinaMovie Director Alex Garland made a movie where the robot, Ava, is the protagonist. pic.twitter.com/BobJ3dz2CQ— Lance Ulanoff (@LanceUlanoff) April 10, 2015
The film, though, does appear to take dim view of technology companies. Isaacs runs a firm similar to Google and uses the ubiquity of his company's search engine and phones to, essentially spy on everyone, including Gleason. Although what he ends up doing is a lot more like stealing than spying.
The movie, which is rated R, features all female robots and some nudity, though Garland insisted it's not misogyny, noting he had spent a great deal of time thinking about why Ava had to be a woman. He reminded the audience, darkly, that most technology companies are run by men. The two human characters, Caleb and Nathan, almost had to be men and in order for Ava to... Suffice to say it made sense that Isaacs was building female robots.
In the end, Ex Machina is not a dire warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence or the coming robot uprising. It's a provocative film about the evil that humans do and what robots that will ultimately act and think like humans may do, as well.