The movie Ex Machina has been cited by many writers around the world as a film that poses profound questions for the future of humanity. Scientists doubt, even given the extraordinary advances in technology awaiting us, that artificial intelligence can realistically match the combined intelligence and consciousness of human beings. Others, however, believe fervently that it can. Raymond Ramcharitar reviews this thought-provoking movie, directed by Alex Garland.
The legendary Matrix movies provided a paradoxical slick and seductive glimpse of a dystopian future, where humankind's obsession with the machine finally creates artificial intelligence which promptly declares war on us, and wins. Alex Garland's Ex Machina goes at the creation myth from the other end: in the beginning was a man, then a woman, then sin, then death. Ex Machina is as spare and primal as The Matrix was epic and visually baroque.
Machina has just three principal actors who are onscreen for most of the movie, Domnhall Gleeson as a scruffy cool/nerd programmer (Caleb), is selected by his reclusive computer genius boss Oscar Isaac (Nathan), and helicoptered to his retreat, dug into a mountain, to work on his latest project, Ava (Alicia Vikander), an android, and Nathan's shot at creating AI.
This moment, of massive data sets and global computing networks is indispensable to the plot, as it is only with these data, mined from the billions and trillions of Internet interactions, can Nathan create the realistic simulacrum of the human brain.
This sets the stage for the paradoxical state of the android: the AI in this case is undoubtedly machine, but not the faceless giant servers, the simulated agents, or the octopi drones of the Matrix. This machine is beautiful. It has an alluring, vulnerable face, a name, Ava, and a personality to match the mellifluous vowels. Caleb's function is to administer the Turing test, to determine whether the machine has true consciousness, whether its intelligence is distinguishable from a human's.
To do this, Caleb has to conduct a number of interviews with Ava, whose femininity proves to be an unexpected distraction, despite its obvious artifice. Because, to repeat, Ava is beautiful. Even the transparent stomach and visible internal metal spine and entrails are beautiful, as they fuse into the covered over, anatomically correct parts, snugly and stylishly. It's as if the essential parts of the woman are isolated and emphasised, and apparently, it's enough for a man.
An interesting aside, Caleb's response to Ava establishes that, even stripped of its inessential parts, a beautiful face, a low, vulnerable voice, wide hips, and perfectly proportioned breasts can activate in men primal and overwhelming urges like caring, desire, and deceit. It could say, also, that as men's responses go, women's minds and motivations remain mysterious and dangerous when the asymmetries of power and status, and the noise of society, are stripped away. Except this isn't a woman. But whatever it is, once it has the things men respond to, it is, or it's close enough.
Apparently in matters of male desire, reciprocity isn't as important as the appearance of reciprocity.This subtext makes the meetings between Ava and Caleb fascinating and macabre, as he focuses on her beauty, and ignores the transparent skin and metallic strips visible in her limbs, and her gel polymer brain, which is also visible behind her latex face, and she leads him ever so gently and invisibly, to fall in love with her. Indeed, the machinery is just a distraction from the intricate plot of non-verbal language that evolves at their meeting.
It's a creation myth, so this is necessary, but this is just the first act–behind this is the creator, Nathan, bearded, thick-limbed, and intense, watching, programming and drinking himself into a dangerous ferocity for the first half of the movie.
Nathan has his own plans, and his manipulation is as transparent and casual as fate.
Nathan's preoccupations and machinations are evident, but they, too, serve as a distraction from the visual narrative that unfolds, creating a pretty breathtaking story of its own. Creation takes place not in the midst of civilisation, but in the midst of nature, in often harsh, and for the purposes of cinema, majestic environments. Ex Machina does not disappoint in this regard.
The innards of Nathan's nest is a linear maze of steel, concrete and glass: long fluorescent light-lit corridors, implacable concrete walls, and thick, transparent, impenetrable frames of glass which separate, taunt, and reflect everything silently. If this reflects the postmodern, or posthuman condition, the outside, the extravagant wildness and green of the forest, the pure white ribbon of the waterfall, and the impregnable gray rocks into which Nathan's nest is fitted, provide the other end of the spectrum of artifice and nature.
Out of the tense, emotionally harrowing human confrontations in those close quarters arise indispensable questions to the present time–as much concerning the relations of men and women, as the capacity for self delusion and deceit of human beings, as our future with the machines we now find our physical bodies and minds fused with.
These questions have been asked before, notably in Ridley Scott's classic, Blade Runner, but also in technologically primitive but intellectually sophisticated times, as in the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea (he creates a statue so beautiful he falls in love with it and Aphrodite brings her to life). A different take on it was Steven Spielberg's romantic techno-fable, AI, in 2001, where it is the robot who desires to become human to experience love.
That seems almost na�ve now, as this question is dispensed with early on and more complex ones are asked in a different tone, and against a different backdrop now, when technology is not so much integrated as fused into our lives. Cultural theorists call this the posthuman age. It is anticipated that from here will blossom what the futurist Ray Kurzweil called The Singularity, when technological knowledge and advance will become so rapid and complex, humans' ability to understand it will fail (unless we're enhanced by the same machines we created).
Humankind's fascination with the impending moment, when it is supplanted by a superior intelligence, is laid out in its most elemental form in Ex Machina. What it also reveals in the interactions of Ava and Caleb, is that far from the big questions of man and womankind's fate, and nature of Anthropocene, the moment when mankind assumes the status of a geological disruption in its collective ability to change the planet's fate, the small questions of our existence remain unanswered.
As Caleb and Nathan show, we still have not mastered the primal, primitive emotions which drove us to make war on competing hominid species in pre-history, and which lead us now to make war within the infinitesimal spaces of difference within our own species till the present. Watching this simple, ancient-feeling tale of love and betrayal unfold allows much fruitful contemplation of those ideas.
This might seem impossibly distant from the reality of an island teetering on the bring of techno and developmental atavism, but if nothing else, the unfurling of the dilemmas is very entertaining.