The Weekend Review: Ex Machina

In which I review a selection of last weekend's entertainment.

As you may already be aware, Ex Machina is a movie that had been on my radar for quite some time.  The trailers promised a dark, cerebral sci-fi thriller.  The premise was about as trippy as the best of science fiction.  Throw in Alexander Garland - the man behind the scripts for 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Dredd - and I knew that I simply had to see it when it hit theaters stateside.

When Caleb is selected for a cutting edge research project, he doesn't know what to expect.  Nathan is a programming savant who invented the equivalent of Google when he was still a teenager.  But after being flown to Nathan's remote estate, Caleb is informed that over the next week he'll be administering a Turing Test to the world's first artificially intelligent machine.  But as he begins his tests, he realizes that nothing is as it seems, and that Nathan has an insidious agenda of his own.

If Oscars were awarded based on the strength of a movie's premise, Ex Machina would unquestionably be this year's best picture.  While the dark implications of AI are hardly new, this particular twist on the idea has never been filmed before: somebody testing and giving serious thought to the idea that a machine has the same level of sapience as a human.

When you combine that with Alex Garland's intelligent and stalkingly patient direction, you end up with an exceptionally cerebral, aesthetically measured film.  Seriously, if I didn't know any better going into Ex Machina, I would have thought that Alex Garland was an experienced director with decades worth of experience in that regard, rather than a screenwriter tackling is directorial debut.

The film is one of the most methodically staged and paced films that I've seen come out in my lifetime.  For Ex Machina, Garland adopts a Kubrickian style of photography, in which every shot has a deliberate, pre-ordained purpose to the film as a whole.  While some frustrated movie-goers bemoaned how it it dragged, I never thought that it moved any slower (nor faster) than it needed to.

That's not to say that Ex Machina wasn't without its flaws, just that none of them were visual.  Caleb is a poorly fleshed out  character, especially when contrasted with the only other human of any narrative importance: Nathan.  Nathan was an incredibly interesting, nuanced and unsettling character: the kind of person that looks perfectly fine on the surface but feels all sorts of wrong at his core.

Caleb was given a disproportionate amount of screen time compared to the amount of development he was afforded.  While I  understand that Garland's focus was always on Ava and the question of her personhood, there were more than enough quiet, isolated moments that could have been repurposed to delving further into his character.  Or when Ava reverses the Turing Test on Caleb, she could have probed further into the idea of who he was and the validity of his personhood (like a sci-fi Hannibal Lector).

There was also a moment near the end - involving Ava and an exceedingly minor Human character - that fails to hold up under logical scrutiny.  I won't reveal exactly what happens, but the unquestioning ease at which this other character goes along with the situation at face value doesn't make sense.  This would have either blown up into a physical confrontation or dissolved with a simple refusal to go along with Ava's request.

While this doesn't diminish what Ex Machina actually was able to accomplish, it does keep it from taking its place among the greater pantheon of science fiction.  It's basically a more commercially-minded - and worse - take on Under the Skin with a few painfully obvious script issues.  If you can get past the movie's deliberate pacing, its mind-bending premise and its occasional scriptural shortcoming, you owe it to yourself to check out one of the best sci-fi movies to come out in years.

Rating:  7.5/10

Buy on BluRay:  Probably not (if only because I have my doubts about its rewatchability)

So what is your favorite cinematic take on artificial intelligence?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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