Ex Machina

While popular science-fiction films have taught us that, no matter what we do, robots that become self-aware will eventually rise up and kill us, recent advances in artificial intelligence in the real world has confirmed something much seedier about the human imperative: that if given the technology to design thinking, feeling robots, we will always try to have sex with them. Always. In every instance.
Alex Garland’s beautifully haunting new film, Ex Machina, seems to want to bridge that gap. Taking cues from obvious predecessors like 2001: A Space Odyssey and AI—some will even compare it to Her—Ex Machina stands solidly on its own as a highly stylized and mesmerizing film, never overly dependent on CGI, and instead built upon the ample talents of a small cast.
The film’s title is a play on the phrase deus ex machina (“god from the machine”), which is a plot device wherein an unexpected event or character seemingly comes out of nowhere to solve a storytelling problem. Garland interprets the phrase literally: Here, that machine is a robot named Ava, played by Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, and that nowhere is where her creator, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), performs his research and experiments. Ava is a heavenly mechanical body of sinewy circuitry topped with a lovely face, reminiscent of a Chris Cunningham creation. Her creator is an alcoholic genius and head of a Google-like search engine called Bluebook which has made him impossibly rich. He lives alone in a slickly modern research facility/dream house hundreds of miles from civilization in a pristine forest abutting some glaciers. His day-to-day routine consists mostly of tinkering with his cyborgs and getting wasted. Enter Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), who is helicoptered in after winning a lottery at work for which the prize is a week at Nathan’s house. Nathan also intends to use Caleb to conduct something of a Turing test on steroids with Ava to determine if she can truly exhibit human behavior.
Caleb arrives at the house to find a hung-over Nathan sweating out his toxins by pounding a punching bag. With his shaved head, full beard and gym clothes uniform, Nathan is the epitome of the retired tech genius, a Silicon Valley nerd-bro. He shows Caleb around, informing him that his access key will leave the guess work out of his visit—he can enter some rooms, others he can’t, it’s all up to the key card. Nathan’s persona is odd, forced, too casual: He throws lots of “dudes” and “bros” into his conversation, and in an early piece of character foreshadowing, he drunkenly reminisces about how a ghost in Ghostbusters performed oral sex on Dan Aykroyd. Slowly, throughout these early conversations, it becomes clear that Nathan is an expert cipher; an almost maniacal arrogance hides underneath his cool demeanor, ready to bubble up at any time.