Ex Machina
(2015)
(SPOILERS) Ex Machina
is a handsome, meticulously crafted film that if nothing else evidences Alex
Garland as a filmmaker of talent. As a screenwriter, however, the jury is still
out. I’m a little surprised by the levels of discussion the picture has
provoked, in fact. Anyone would think Garland was reinventing the AI wheel, or
breaking profound new ground in the study of gender identification. He has directed
an engaging picture, a chamber piece populated by fine actors giving fine
performances, but one that treads familiar ground and allows its plot twists to
lead it by the nose. It might be slightly unfair to suggest Ex Machina merely pays lip service to
its thematic content, but plot is undoubtedly dominant, so theme ultimately
gets short shrift.
As such, the picture probably offers up for more effective
analysis its debut director’s (leaving aside whatever uncredited involvement he
did or didn’t have helming Dredd)
continuing obsessions than any overt ideas he attempts to explore.
Unfortunately, by this point we have more than enough insight into his quirks. He’s
all about the hook, and there’s a point with his work, usually during the third
act, where the edifice crumbles and the viewer is left with not very much at
all. Ex Machina is more polished than
earlier efforts in this respect, and more controlled; the mayhem of The Beach, 28 Days Later and Sunshine
is avoided, yet perversely the emphasis on talk rather than action exposes even
more unflatteringly that any notions of intellect Ex Machina has are veneer; it’s the flesh and viscera Garland is
interested in.
The set up is straightforward enough; coder Caleb (Domhnall
Gleeson) “wins a competition” to spend a week with Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the
CEO of Bluebook, the company he works for. He’s delivered by helicopter to
Nathan’s remote mountain hideaway, where his boss reveals he wants Caleb to
probe the AI credentials (using the Turing Test, naturally) of the machine mind
(and body) he has created, Ava (Alicia Vikander). Nothing is as straightforward
as it seems, of course, and Ava warns Caleb that Nathan is not to be trusted.
Caleb in turn develops increasing strong feelings towards the intelligence he
is probing.
By structuring the picture as a grey box for Caleb to
unlock, Garland makes Ex Machina
about the revelations, rather than grappling with the carrot on the stick; the
mind of the AI. He squeezes his players to fit his resolution rather than
allowing the material to develop organically. So Nathan’s deeper motivation is
rather suspect; he’s doing this to see how convincing Ava can be at
manipulating others? Really?
Sure, we can attach irrationally egotistical foibles and
failings to Nathan, but they fail to really satisfy in terms of his grand
scheme. This is a guy (a bulked up bully, an alpha nerd who cannot form a
meaningful relationship with an actual woman, but even more than that locks
himself away and can’t form a meaningful relationship with an actual human
being) with a first rate mind who carefully devises a plan to utilise
hoodwinked doorstop beta nerd Caleb in his test. He is able to account for
numerous variables yet lacks the crucial foresight to only pretend to get
pissed when it comes to the week of his test.
Nathan’s behaviour is an act, except when Garland needs it
to be otherwise in order to oil the wheels of the plot. He has the wherewithal
to install a battery-operated camera in Ava’s cell, but why did he not have one
there all along? It beggars belief that one with his genius couldn’t have added
two and two and made Ava as the source of the power cuts; indeed, it reads as
if he must have known for it to make any sense that Caleb and Ava could hatch a
plan together. He’s also someone well aware of the danger of his creations yet
he fails to programme any protocols or overrides in order to prevent just the
kind of fate that befalls him (“Is it
strange to have made someone that hates you?”)
Conveniences of plot aside, there are other more pressing
problems with Garland’s tale. Much of the conversation regarding Ex Machina has
focussed on the final scene in relation to its play with gender politics; that
we (the male viewer, presumably) ought to be less concerned about the
abandonment of Caleb and should rather empathise more with the mind-set of the
imprisoned and subjugated Ava. This reading wasn’t foremost in my mind since I
saw the picture predominately as a (not necessarily insightful) take on AI
fare; Ava is not a woman, so it doesn’t follow to see her imprisonment of Caleb
in Nathan’s fortress as the act of a woman betraying her heroic male saviour.
Indeed, the rest of the picture makes a point that Ava is not the chassis Nathan has designed for her/it.
In seeing the picture as a simple metaphor for men’s
objectification of women, Nathan is the overt transgressor. His entire motive for
creating AIs is as a glorified sex toy; one might see this as an extension of
how, with all the possible uses of IT and the Internet, the number one favourite
is pornography. If so, that’s also what makes Garland’s a kind of rote choice.
What else have you got for us here, Alex? Apart from immodestly congratulating
yourself for being able to take apart your own gender’s motivations in a manner
that really isn’t so profound (i.e. conveyed through a plot twist)? One might
also see both Caleb and Nathan as avatars of the new phase of remote interaction
of the human race, where “a beer and a
conversation” are foreign tools of communication. If that’s the case, the
analysis is a disappointment, and one rather opines Garland’s decision that the
film is “not a seminar”; it might
have been more satisfying if it was.
As such, the choice to make Nathan a monstrous pervert is
perhaps the least interesting one Garland could have chosen. It’s the same
unrefined impulse that fosters Colonel Kurtz clones in each of his pictures (if
Caleb isn’t Captain Willard, the man sent to kill Nathan, the genius demi-god
gone rogue who makes his own rules, he is
responsible for his death). At one point there are the makings of an
interesting conversation about the sexualisation of his AIs, where Nathan
attempts to justify his choices (“Can
consciousness exist without interaction?”), but it is quickly dropped for
the question of Caleb’s desire for Ava (“You
bet she can fuck”) versus his intellectual interest.
Oscar Isaac is a powerhouse as Nathan, but the character
itself isn’t very interesting. The same with Gleeson’s Caleb. Even though they
have far more screen time than Ava, they are still rudimentarily fashioned facilitators
of the plot. Alpha and beta, nerd king and hero worshipper who turns. Not that
readily recognisable types can’t work –there are only so many under the sun – but
Garland has nothing new for them to do.
Gleeson playing the affably sensitive weakling already seems
like the most typecast role for him. Caleb is more interesting when he is
allowed to exhibit clinical interest, rather than proving Nathan’s kinky
automata fetish (“She’s fucking amazing!”)
and what a bad role model he is. Gleeson seems to be playing against a sexual
response to Ava, and not just because his character thinks that’s the “good
person” thing to do, but the character gets muddied in the third act dramatics.
Ultimately it seems as if Garland is playing out a fairly basic polar scenario
of his own battle with vying forces of masculinity; his objectifying gaze versus
more empathic impulses (notably, for all his sensitivity, Caleb has a porn
profile that informs Ava’s features).
In theory, we are seeing the film through Caleb’s eyes, yet
Garland isn’t a writer who can keep authorial distance. His eyes and impulses take
over. If he doesn’t allow Caleb to become Willard, the character nevertheless embarks
on the familiar descent into blood and madness, exemplified by the scene in
which Caleb cuts his wrist open to see if he is also an AI. It ought to be
delirious and disturbing, but it’s obvious; Garland foreshadows the idea in the
first scene of the picture with electronica reflections on Caleb’s face.
The main problem with the gender based interpretation of the
ending, however, is that it derives from a cake-and-eat-it approach on the part
of the filmmaker. It relies on the female character(s) being objectified
through the male gaze throughout, the complete lack of effort to fashion a
character for Ava being justified by the “Fooled ya!” of her not requiring the
man to be her everything. The same is also true of the picture’s treatment of
AI (the Turing Test is quickly dispensed with in any kind of meaningful way,
and the engaged part of the sessions comes from the reveals about Caleb when
Ava is characterised as a walking lie detector). We know Ava wants to stand at
a busy intersection (to interact) but that’s about it.
I’m not going to suggest this is an elaborate ploy by Garland
to circumvent an inability to write female characters (by making them
impenetrable, or, in the case of Sonoya Mizuno’s Kyoto, mute), but its very
easier to look at the picture and see self-awareness and “legitimate” intent as
justification for a series of less worthy indulgences. Such as the predilection for lingering on
naked female bodies. If the great insight is that men don’t see women as people,
well, it’s a perverse position coming from a filmmaker’s gaze that doesn’t see
women as people. And the response is really rather “No shit”; this is a very
familiar trope by this point.
Hinging the picture on Ava incarcerating Caleb creates a
perverse situation where, by drawing attention to the expected dehumanising
male gaze, Garland denies Ava the basic trait of empathy. She leaves someone to
die and so shows her essential inhumanity (one would hope empathy for was seen
as a universally cherishable emotion, rather than sacrificial for purpose of
making a point about locking women in boxes).
Which is partly why the gender associative reading of the ending ought
really be seen as only a layer, rather than a point. Ava isn’t human. She isn’t
a woman. Sure, Garland is addressing the male gaze in his rather cack-handed
way (one wonders if his mute Asian sex slave is also intended as rather
cack-handed commentary), but he’s really illustrating the earlier conversation
between Nathan and Caleb, in which AI is the next stage of development and we
are no more important to them than Neanderthal man was to us (see also the
recent Automata – Ava’s escape into
humanity here is suggestive of that picture’s conclusion, where only the
machines are destined to survive and breed -
and many others); one day AIs will see us this way.
There are many ideas worth exploring in the premise (should
more advanced consciousness inherently carry with it more advanced concepts of “humanity”
and value of all life?) but Garland opts not to go there. Ava is removed and
unknowable – we understand HAL’s “grey box” better, which should be no surprise
as 2001 was an influence (the design,
with its hermetic, womblike interiors and ambient sound also acknowledges an
overt debt).
Garland has dropped the most interest aspect of the picture
for a “clever” twist and, particularly in a piece that designs itself around
talk rather than action, that’s such a missed opportunity. Has Ava learnt her
disregard for life from her impassive creator, who cares for no one? Does Ava
even have no regard for her AI kin? It appears not, suggesting she operates
from a basic survival instinct (not really that higher minded, then, but very
sub-HAL). Vikander’s performance (and movements) are tremendously poised and
modulated, but she’s in service of a blank canvas.
If the ending is the point, and you are questioning you
response to Caleb’s imprisonment, then Ex
Machina may be as rewarding and resonant as it would like to be. But if you
don’t think its such a big deal, because you’re familiar with the odd slice of
AI fare, then the sacrifice of character or insight into Ava isn’t worthwhile
as this side is neither challenging
nor provocative. Garland inserts some powerful moments, because – as noted – he
has it as a director. In particular, the failed former experiments, with one
razing its arms to points trying to escape its confines, have a stark horror.
He also stages the occasional bizarre interlude; the impromptu Isaac dance
routine is about the only moment of levity the picture offers. But he also
makes heavy weather of his metaphors, what with Nathan explaining the Jackson
Pollock on his wall (“The challenge is
not to act automatically”) and the cardinal cliché of quoting Oppenheimer (see
also season one of The 100).
So Ex Machina is
pretty much what I would expect of Garland trying his hand at the cerebral. You
know how the last act of Sunshine
disappointed because it went all Kurtz? Imagine if it hadn’t and there was no
excuse for it failing to wholly satisfy. That’s close to where this lands,
cutting back on Garland’s obsessions but only enough to show his field is
parched. He favours baser desires and voyeuristic impulses over stimulating
conversation, but he has little to say about either. He creates ambivalence
about characters’ fates but without the presiding godlike gaze of a Kubrick to
render it meaningful. Ex Machina is
diverting and occasionally intriguing, but it lacks the food for the brain its
cool, clear polish and elegant compositions suggest. It’s a triumph of design
and performance, but it’s more interesting for what it isn’t than for what it
is.
