FUTURE CULT CLASSIC
Science fiction thriller
The landscape of science fiction is strewn with the rusting hulks of big-idea pictures that tried and failed to use robots to illuminate the human condition. For every Roy Batty or HAL 9000, there’s been a Bicentennial Man, a Chappie, a Twiki, or an entire movie full of Transformers.
Ex Machina is the rare exception, and it’s the reason we continue to wade through all those other stories about artificial intelligence that are far too artificial and not at all intelligent. This might just be the best android anecdote since Blade Runner.
The robot in question is Ava, performed by Swedish dancerturned-actor Alicia Vikander. With her strangely attenuated limbs she recalls an undernourished child, yet her body shape is undeniably female. Her skin alternates between a pliant, transparent material and something resembling a textured sports bra and shorts. The effect is unnerving, making her appear both naked and clothed at the same time.
But what of Ava’s internal life? That’s what Caleb has been summoned to find out. Computer genius Nathan (Oscar Isaac), has made a breakthrough in machine sentience, and Ava is the result. Employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) arrives at Nathan’s country-sized country estate to perform a kind of Turing test — talk to his boss’s machine and decide whether what comes back is self-awareness or just a good imitation.
Dropped off by a helicopter, Caleb stumbles into Nathan’s compound. Boxes of glass, steel and concrete nestled in an idyllic woodland setting, it’s as if Frank Lloyd Wright had designed a prison.
The penitentiary effect is heightened by the fact that every door has a key card access. Ava, meanwhile, inhabits a monastic Plexiglas cell that facilitates conversation while isolating her physically.
The Ava-Caleb-Nathan triangle comprises the entire cast, unless you count Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), a servant who speaks no English and could almost be a robot herself. Cut off from outside, Caleb’s only channels of communication are with Ava and Nathan. Ava is flawless to a fault, and so disarming that Caleb starts to feel something beyond scientific curiosity. Nathan, sporting a survivalist beard and a drinking habit, seems less predictable and more dangerous. But hey, at least he’s human, right?
That’s what it all comes down to, in a constantly unfolding fractal puzzle that had my circuits engaged from the first frames. When Nathan brags that he’s made the biggest advance in human history, Caleb counters that when you create sentience you enter the history not of man but of gods. Writer/director Alex Garland has drawn from the dystopic well before: He wrote the screenplays for Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Sunshine, and adapted Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go for the screen.
But this is his first turn as director, and it suits him: he’s created a cautionary tale that entertains even as it forces us to think. I don’t know if the vision of the future he presents will ever come to pass. Who does?