Ex Machina
Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac
Finally! An intelligent, thought-provoking science fiction movie!
Gleeson plays Caleb, a young hot-shot programmer working for the BlueBook corporation, the most succesful Internet search engine in the world. Caleb wins a competition to spend a week with Nathan, the multi-billionaire founder of BlueBook, at his secluded estate in the midst of a wilderness. Or so it seems.
Isaac plays Nathan brilliantly as one of the most unpleasantly egotistical characters I’ve seen. Imagine Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg rolled into one and ramped up several levels. Nathan reveals to Caleb that he has been secretly building an AI (Artificial Intelligence), embedded into a robot he calls Ava.
Ava, played by Vikander, has a beautiful human face, hands and feet, but the rest of her is exposed mesh and mechanics, and we hear the whining of her motors — so we are constantly being reminded that she’s not a human being (very clever special effects here, by the way). Caleb’s task is to test Ava by conversing with her in a kind of extended Turing Test, in order to determine if Nathan has truly created an intelligent being.
But there are wheels within wheels here. Caleb spends several long sessions talking to Ava, who does indeed seem to have a fully human personality. Caleb can speak with Ava through a thick glass wall, but he can’t touch her; she is confined within a set of two or three rooms. She has never left the building. Through their long conversations, Caleb begins to fall for Ava. Was this Nathan’s intention?
The psychological tension ramps up, and up. Is Ava really in love with Caleb? Or has she just been pre-programmed to do so? Is Caleb being tricked by Nathan? The end is revealing, and to me, unexpected.
The movie thus raises all sorts of issues about how we might deal with an artificial intelligence, about what our motives might be in creating it, about our responsibilities to such an entity, and how such an intelligence might feel about its creator. As I say, thought-provoking and intelligent. I really liked it.
