Ex_Machina, directorial debut of writer Alex Garland, is a stark, almost Spartan film. It has only four speaking roles - Caleb, Nathan, Ava and a pilot who is in the film for about three minutes at the very beginning and plays no significant role in the actual narrative - and one silent - Sonoya Mizuno as Nathan's unspeaking domestic, Kyoko - is set in perhaps five rooms of a single complex and shot in a suppressed palette of muted traffic light pastels. It focuses on the relationships between Caleb and Ava, and Caleb and Nathan (with Nathan and Ava only sharing a couple of scenes) over the details of the AI itself. The three leads are excellent: Gleason as a slightly colder version of his usual loveable nerd persona, Isaac as the misanthropic lovechild of Steve Jobs and Grizzly Adams, and Vikander as the wide-eyed cyber-gamine.
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| "Pay attention: Here comes the science part." |
The mechanics of the AI are, in as much as they are discussed at all, moderately bunkum, and a piece of code that Caleb hacks out would apparently only serve to find prime numbers up to 100. This is, however, because the film is not concerned with how to make an artificial intelligence, but by the standards by which we might judge one. This means that, unlike say The Machine, this is a film that very much cares about the motivations behind giving an AI a human body, and in particular an attractive feminine form. Its discourse is on what makes us human, more than how to make a conscious machine, a question which manifests in Caleb's increasing uncertainty in his own nature.
Ex_Machina is a sophisticated, slow-paced technothriller which takes a bleak - some might say harsh - attitude to alpha-nerd masculinity and perhaps to humanity in general. I don't think it's a misogynist film, but it is definitely a film about misogyny, which means that there is a fair bit of it on screen and it can get pretty skin-crawling in places.
It isn't a feelgood film, but it's well worth a look.
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