- Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised to discover that director Alex Garland's resume includes some writing for video games. Although I'm hardly an authority on gaming, Garland's Ex Machina immediately reminded me of one of those immersive, atmospheric games like Portal or BioShock in which the protagonist is dropped off in the middle of some strange complex without so much as a reliable guidebook. I was also immediately reminded of Garland's kindred spirit and fellow Londoner Duncan Jones, who also worked on video games and whose own directorial debut Moon employed a single futuristic setting and limited number of characters to tell a simple-but-fascinating story. Like Jones, Garland gets a lot of mileage out of a deceptively straightforward setup.
- The situation in Ex Machina is this: a twenty-something computer programmer named Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a trip to the top-secret research compound owned by his boss, Nathan (Oscar Isaac). After Caleb signs a particularly stringent non-disclosure document, Nathan reveals that he has developed a walking, talking artificial intelligence android named Ava (Alicia Vikander). Naturally, Nathan wants Caleb to evaluate how well Ava passes for a human by subjecting her to the Turing Test. But as Caleb or any other sci-fi aficionado could tell you, the test usually doesn't involve face-to-face communication, especially given the strange tension between Ava's remarkably human mannerisms and decidedly robotic appearance. Still, the experience of meeting both Nathan and Ava is so overwhelming that Caleb mostly keeps his reservations to himself.
- But let's discuss Nathan for a moment. Played brilliantly by Oscar Isaac as an amalgam of many prominent real-life tech gurus, Nathan is the sort of boss who constantly insists that he and Caleb "just be two guys" having a beer and a conversation. (It's always the bosses who suggest that and never the employees, I note.) One infers that Nathan has held a few too many solo drunken introspectives on his place in history, comparing himself alternately to Prometheus, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Jackson Pollock. From the compound's abundant security cameras, locked doors, and cracked plexiglass barriers, one also suspects that Nathan isn't sharing the whole story, even before Ava takes advantage of a momentary power outage to warn Caleb about trusting anything Nathan says. But just when Caleb starts to ask the right questions...time to grab a beer and hit the dance floor!
- Ex Machina is one of these rare movies that does so many things right that it's challenging to pick any one component that stands out from the rest. Its settings are always too expansive or claustrophobic, constantly keeping the viewer on edge. Caleb is a perfectly stereotypical computer scientist who, in my favorite character quirk, hasn't met a literary reference he couldn't overexplain. Nathan and Ava are always saying one thing while clearly processing other thoughts in parallel. Maybe the silent Japanese servent Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) isn't an android, but c'mon -- she has to be, right? Everybody apparently has sex on the brain, but nobody is thinking about it correctly. In the end, I think we can safely conclude that Ava passes the Turing Test. The movie has understandably less confidence in Caleb and Nathan.
