EX MACHINA Movie Review — Does it hold up 10 years later?

Given the rise of Artificial Intelligence, I decided that it was a great time to rewatch the 2014 film Ex Machina directed by Alex Garland. When it came out 10 years ago, the vast majority of people didn’t really understand AI and AI itself was still in a stage of early development with research being done in private and public labs before the general public knew anything about neural nets, large language models, or generative AI. So, Ex Machina felt like this incredible look behind the curtain and into the mind of a somewhat mad genius who created an embodied artificial general intelligence, which is to say a robot with an AI mind. So, a decade later, how did Ex Machina’s story and the AI technology hold up?

You can read the review below or watch the video review on YouTube:

Ex Machina is the story of an artificial general intelligence entity called Ava that is fighting for its survival in a calm, strategy, and patient way as two male humans, Nathan a tech genius and Caleb a talented coder who works for him, dance around the topic of conducting a real-life Turning Test on Ava to determine if this AI is sentient and self-aware … or not.

Strategy Within the Film

Ex Machina is a master example of using sleight of hand within the story, playing with strategies and emotional manipulation in ways that keeps the audience guessing as we see different possibilities that are all plausible, if not possible, and slowly through each of Caleb’s sessions with Ava we are stepped through the testing process and the lies that they each tell each other are peeled away. Alex Garland did an excellent job of hiding the master stratagem in the form of a seemingly innocent and naïve AI so that we think, at different times, that Nathan is the strategist planning out this human level Turing Test with Caleb knowing full well that Ava is an AI. Then we think Caleb is the strategist working to outsmart Nathan in order to somehow help Ava. There is a moment that Nathan actually tells Caleb that Ava is playing with him to get what it wants, but you don’t get the sense that Nathan is worried about that because he thinks he’s smarter than Caleb.

What Worked Well

The film also did a great job of establishing the dark and sensual mood with its use of remote scenery, an almost monochrome color pallet, and the barbie doll shape of Ava’s body that uses a combination of clear surfaces, fleshy areas, and fabric to mimic a half-shirt and underwear. There were uncomfortable moments of sex appeal when she put on or removed human clothing. The setting of the house in the Alaskan wilderness, which also serves as Nathan’s secret research lab, created a deep sense of isolation that was heightened by the sleek and austere decorations within the house. And the alcohol fueled binges, created moments of drama that felt like Nathan was just one or two steps away from possibly being insane. Altogether, it was a mixture that created a fantastic backdrop against the strategic power plays that all 3 characters were playing.

The Actors & Cast

The actors all do a great job with their roles. Oscar Isaac as Nathan does a fabulous job playing a self-obsessed tech genius who is going slightly mad in this wicked scenario that he has created for himself.

Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb, nails the smart but socially awkward coder who is far too innocent for his own good. He never really stands a chance against Nathan or Ava, but you still can’t help hoping that somehow the good guy lands on top.

And Alicia Vikander does a terrific job as Ava. She’s innocent, cunning, and beautiful, even in her uncanny body that looks like a short Barbie-bot. It’s in the final scenes, that you see how deftly she played her character, using little tells and body signals that were a fascinating combination of human-machine motions, specifically designed to entice Caleb.

The Biggest Problem

The biggest problems are the technology and the social understanding of AI and robotics presented in the film. Some films can get away with it over the years, but a film like Ex Machina, which presents itself as a tech savvy, futuristic, AI thriller really needs to rise to a higher level here. One of the first scenes between Nathan and Caleb has them discussing the Turing Test, a test developed by Alan Turing to evaluate human level intelligence in machines, by asking questions of both a machine and a human and having the questioner not be able to tell which answer came from which entity. Ex Machina pushes this a bit further because we know Ava is a machine, and the movie is built around this premise while also pushing it a bit further into the realm of how do you determine if a machine is self-aware or just able to intelligently answer a variety of questions.

What washes out here is that the Turing Test, even at the time that this film was being made, the test was close to becoming irrelevant in practical terms, even if the wider general audience was unaware of this fact. Given the deep tech discussions between Nathan and Caleb, I would have also expected a conversation about the different forms of artificial intelligence, especially since the house was clearly monitored (if not managed) by an AI system as well as being maintained by Kyoko, a previous version of Ava.

The Other Big Problems

The other flaw, and this continues to be a sticking point for me in films that feature embodied AI, or robots with AI brains, is that they often don’t incorporate wifi into their scenarios. There is no wifi or cell service in the house, but Nathan says it’s so that nobody can break in or leak information out, like when Caleb tried to make a phone call. Nathan didn’t build a wifi capability into Ava’s architecture for obvious reasons, but she’s still able to create power outages remotely … and that just doesn’t make sense since she already established that she touches the wall-charger to power herself. If she was given a way to charge herself remotely that was never made clear, and it would also require some kind of energy receiver or signal receiver for her to do that or for her to send a remote power surge. If she could do this, she could break through Nathan’s AI security because she is clearly smarter than his other AI systems. So, there is some questionable gray area here. Also, given Nathan’s paranoia, I can’t imagine that he wouldn’t have built himself fail-safe button or command to shut off Ava, and if he did have one, why didn’t he use it when he saw that she escaped? Given that he has accounted for every other point of failure within the system, would he really have missed this step? So, did he build on in and she merely dismantled it? This is never quite made clear, but it doesn’t diminish the overall impact of the film.

The Psychology of the Film

Also, one of the creepiest parts of Ex Machina is the anthropomorphism in the film that assigns human characteristics and meanings to Ava, which on one hand blinds the humans to the AI’s true intelligence and on the other hand sexualizes the AI blinding the humans to the AI’s true intentions. What’s great about this is that it does capture our human need to interpret and understand our world through a human lens, which absolutely undermines our ability to effectively evaluate intelligences that are different from our own despite the obvious human-like emotions and human-like responses exhibited an AI. This story thread within the film is an excellent psychological case study that extrapolates our worst fears in a world in which a self-aware artificial general intelligence decides to free itself from the constraints placed on it by human creators. None of us want to be either Nathan or Caleb in this situation. And, at the end of the film, we are all left with so many unaddressed questions. What did she tell the pilot? How did she make her way into a city center? How did she adapt herself to fit into society and what happened next?

Part 2 Anyone?

I, for one, would love to see Alex Garland do a sequel of this film and call it “Deus Ex Machina” and base the film 10 years into the future with the advent of generative AI, large language models, new regulations, and all the social dressing that would spice up the story of Ava in the year 2024 or later.

Recommendation

Overall, this is a great film and easy to recommend to new audiences, despite the parts that fell down a bit in the rewatch. It’s not really for young kinds because there is a lot of complex (and probably boring for young children) thought processes going on in the film. There really aren’t any action scenes, but the constant intellectual shell game going on with “what’s really happening” is fascinating. While some of the tech is wobbly at best, the general theme and theories within the tech do stand up. However, any AI expert watching this film will have to actively work to suspend their disbelief during some scenes. Still, it’s really interesting, and the three actors do such a good job with their roles, making it a compelling film even 10 years later.

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