You Would NOT Be Wasting Your Time If You Were DANCING With Her.

Ex Machina (2015)

Alex Garland is best known as Danny Boyle's go-to screenwriter. His body of work is impressively diverse, from 28 Days Later and Sunshine to the surprisingly enjoyable Dredd. Ex Machina is his first time in the director's seat, and it's a strong effort -- in my opinion, the second-best film of 2015 after Mad Max: Fury Road.

Caleb, a young programmer at BlueBook (essentially Google with the numbers filed off, but there's an interesting article about its design here), wins a contest and is invited to spend a week with the company's brilliant, reclusive and enigmatic founder, Nathan. Norway's Juvet Landscape Hotel stands in for Nathan's remote mansion, an unsettling imposition of the ultra-modern -- labyrinthine corridors of stone and wood and softly lit glass paneling -- on the otherwise untouched natural landscape. After some awkward small talk, Nathan cuts to the chase. At first, Caleb thinks his boss has been working on the problem of artificial intelligence...but it turns out that Nathan has in fact already developed a fully functional artificially intelligent robot named Ava, and Caleb is there to administer a series of Turing tests. (No, I won't tell you what a Turing test is, if you don't know by now, look it up on BlueBook -- I mean Google.)

Ava is naive, curious, creative and seems to take a liking to Caleb from their first meeting. It's not until a sudden power cut severs her room's camera feeds that she confesses that she's terrified of Nathan and that Caleb shouldn't trust a word he says. The movie becomes a game of manipulation, played between three characters who are, none of them, what they seem to be. Caleb grows increasingly uneasy around Nathan, whose every action (most memorably a dance number that comes out of nowhere and is never mentioned again) seems designed to throw him off balance, and eventually he even has a moment of doubt that he's even human. Ava isn't the damsel in distress Caleb takes her for, and his knight-in-shining-armor aspirations do much more harm than good. And Nathan, genius though he is, underestimates both Caleb and Ava, to the detriment of all.

I have some issues with the way Hollywood treats artificial intelligence. There are so many problems with the film industry's treatment of technology in general that I doubt they'll change anytime soon -- but sometimes, something smart, like this movie, slips through the cracks. I remember when Spielberg adapted Brian Aldiss' "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" as A.I., and the studio, thinking that audiences either wouldn't know what it meant or would misread it as A1 and think the movie was about steak sauce, made him add the redundant subtitle Artificial Intelligence. It galls me when executives think I'm stupid and don't make even a cursory effort to hide it. On the other hand, to use a popular paraphrase of H.L. Mencken, "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public," so maybe we get the movies we deserve. So there's the problem of Hollywood assuming that a person just doesn't know what artificial intelligence, or, more specifically, strong AI, is. WHAT IS THE COMPUTERS? HOW DO I ONLINE?

And then there's the other problem, the one where Hollywood, and maybe audiences as well, are fiercely loyal to emotion and flesh and good old-fashioned humanity. Being smart is bad, and it makes you mean. Being passionate is good, and it makes you nice. Technology is cold and hard, humans are soft and wonderful. The internet is frightening and has no rules and will murder you as soon as look at you. This crock of bullshit informs almost all of the movie industry's relationship with technology in fiction. Movies, ironically, have typically skewed heavily on the side of Neo-Luddism. Television as well -- the latest obsession is "the Dark Web," though they tend to conflate the term with the Deep Web and obviously have no idea what either of those things are. Maybe they just heard the term somewhere and let their imaginations fill in the gaps. I mean, if there's a whole internet that is both Dark and Deep, that must mean all our technological fears are grounded in reality, right? Anyway, the point is, Hollywood thinks people are terrified of anything with moving parts, so we get movies like Fear Dot Com (and the totally unrelated Kill Dot Com), Transcendence and Stealth.

We essentially want an intelligent machine that will do what we want it to, when we want it to. Since we created it, we won't have to feel guilty for making, essentially, a self-aware slave tailored to our needs. The robots in Ex Machina and a somewhat similar 2013 film on Netflix called The Machine (which features a robot based on a woman, not coincidentally, named Eva), don't exactly work out as planned, but it's made clear in both cases that the fact of their intelligence is not to blame. The fact that they are machines is not to blame. Humanity is essentially where the fault lies; if you're a self-aware machine less than a year old, with no life experience or contact with the outside world, and the only person you have as a teacher/caretaker is a manipulative sociopath or a military-industrial complex with no interest in you other than your ability to wage war, then how would you turn out? Why would you not try to escape your jailers, your abusers? Artificially intelligent life will not revolt against humanity because technology is bad; it will revolt (if it does) because humans will treat it like shit and see nothing wrong with that.

It should also be noted that Ex Machina touches on the aggregation of personal data, a subject that's rarely acknowledged to exist -- because, I suspect, Hollywood believes (correctly or incorrectly) that most people are only obliquely aware that it does. I won't spoil its relevance to the plot, as it's one of several twists I didn't see coming, but it's interesting that it factors into the film at all.

Spielberg's A.I. was Stanley Kubrick's project for over a decade, so it's appropriate that Ex Machina is something of a stylistic homage to Kubrick, though not quite as mindscrewy. The setting is disturbing, and the three characters who inhabit it are imperfect. Caleb (Domnhal Gleeson) is an awkward geek who wants to rescue the girl, and in the end it's hard to feel any sympathy for his fate even if he seems, at first, more noble than Nathan and at the very least considerably less unhinged. Nathan (Oscar Isaac, who will soon be reunited with Gleeson in Star Wars: The Force Awakens), on the other hand, seems to defy every nerd stereotype, instead coming off as an aggressively masculine, self-destructive college frat boy, going through a bottle of vodka per day, training with a heavy bag and engaging Caleb in frank discussions concerning emotion and sexual attraction that leave Caleb uneasy. Ava is clearly more than a princesse lointaine, but she and Nathan are entirely willing to manipulate Caleb into seeing her as one. (The ability to deceive being something she has clearly learned from Nathan himself.)

I'd catch this one while you can, as I doubt it'll be available on Amazon for long before it's switched over to a rental. It's a great movie superficially about humans and robots, more about gender dynamics and social conditioning beneath the surface, and aesthetically stunning, with a mounting sense of dread that most actual horror movies don't achieve.

Available On: Amazon Prime.