Director: Alex Garland
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander
Release Date: In theaters
Myriad movies have touched on the topic of artificial intelligence. Terminator 2: Judgment Day comes to mind as perhaps the most time-transcending, thrilling take on what happens when we give too much of our own human abilities to machinery. Director/writer Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is the latest and (mostly) worthwhile and visually lustrous attempt to explore the psychology of sentient computers.
Programmer Caleb (a vanilla Domhnall Gleeson) wins a lottery to spend a week with the CEO of Blue Book, a massive Google-type tech company that is making waves in the industry. He’s lifted by helicopter to the remote home of a hipster’s wet dream — the half-mansion, half-bunker of reclusive CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Nathan drinks his fresh juices, but loves a bottle of vodka at any time of day. He’s incredibly intelligent, but blatant sexism taints his genius.
Caleb’s been recruited to perform the Turing Test on Nathan’s latest A.I., Ava (Alicia Vikander). At first a porcelain and glass robot with exposed wire innards, when she dons a wig and dress she looks as if she were made in the image of man. Caleb — the cog in Nathan’s expensive, terrifyingly progressive experiment — finds Ava to pass the test. She’s effortlessly seductive — no trace of machinery in her deceptively inquisitive persona.
Ex Machina is small in some ways, and large in others. An actor’s chamber piece, Vikander, Domhnall and Isaac carry the film, filling out the small spaces and tame pacing of what could otherwise have been a sheepish indie film. Of course, no film could brim with such talent if it weren’t for the might of Garland’s script, a smart, cynical, psychological rapture on the next phase of human evolution and the God’s eye view of the tech industry. It’s full of frightful meditations on the monsters we can create, both with technology, and within ourselves.
Despite full praises of the basics of film in Ex Machina, a well-oiled machine of psychological effects, it may deter some to know it burns slowly. Quite slowly. With episodic lulls and disruptive intertitles. Garland articulates the implications of artificial intelligence in our world more beautifully than anyone has before, but that’s not to say he says anything we haven’t already heard.
Molasses and reiteration aside, Ex Machina will delight, and perhaps enthrall those willing to give it the time and attention it demands.
