Thoughts on Ex Machina

2015
Writer/Director: Alex Garland

After leaving uni and moving back home, I got into the habit of going to the cinema at least once a week. Having more money than usual saved up and enough time off to go whenever I was free, it was the perfect opportunity to indulge my love of cinema beyond my degree. Now I’ve moved to London and am working full time, it’s proving a lot harder to keep up with my regular trips than I’d anticipated. Tickets are hideously expensive here, especially given I’m only free to go at pricier peak times and weekends. It’s typical then of course that so many fantastic-looking films are playing right now; ones which I’m frantically working myself up into excitement about seeing. It seems I (gladly) can’t break my habit and ended up making an impromptu trip to my nearest PictureHouse to go see Ex Machina.

Now this I’ve been anticipating for a while. I’m a big fan of Alex Garland, the author and screenwriter behind some of the most distinct and engaging sci-fi films from the last decade or so. His Danny Boyle collaborations 28 Days Later and Sunshine are both fascinating but flawed works that in their own ways revolutionised the zombie and sci-fi/horror genres respectively. His adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Never Let Me Go gave an understated and all-too-human approach to another sci-fi sub-genre, whilst his work on Dredd helped make it genuinely what is fast becoming one of my favourite films from the last few years. His film work has a style and sensibility which corresponds well with my own love of post-apocalyptic fiction and John Wyndham novels.

So anticipation was high with this, his directorial debut. The trailer looked crisp and stylish, and appealing unlike anything else being released right now. Early reviews were positive. Ex Machina follows Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a young programmer working for a giant Google-like search engine company, who wins a competition granting him the chance to spend a week with Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the elusive CEO who has retreated to his private recluse in the Nordic tundra. The trip turns out to be anything but a casual bonding experience – Nathan has secretly been developing an advanced female robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander), and is asking Caleb to perform a Turing test on her, to determine whether her Artificial Intelligence can pass off as indistinguishably human.

From this sci-fi premise comes an intimate character-based study in a similar vein to Duncan Jones’s Moon. The film is essentially a three-hander, and takes places near entirely in one location, the practical and impersonal spaces and corridors of the research lab, its crisp lighting and emptiness acting as a blank canvas for the human drama unfolding. It plays out similar to something like Sleuth, a claustrophobic study of duplicity and power games. Caleb is very much our protagonist, our voice of reason. Much of the film is made up of theoretical conversations between him and Nathan, with Caleb asking the questions which often popped in my head as I was watching. Whilst the content may not be that complicated on a technical level, it still demanded attention and engagement from the audience in a way which I found quite exhilarating; this is a film which trusts in the capabilities of its audience.

Gleeson brings his usual warmth to Caleb, making him an engaging everyman with his wide-eyed naiveté and genuine awed enthusiasm, as he stumbles through this overwhelmingly alien location. Overall, his motivations are clear: he is driven by a genuine enthusiasm for the project, and is excited by the prospect of being part of “the greatest scientific event in the history of man”. His general readability and vulnerability leaves him struggling under the pressures he faces – from Nathan’s domineering presence, not just physically and intellectually but in the very essence of his house, filled with cameras, and also from Ava, as his fascination for her evolves from simple scientific curiosity into cautious emotional and sexual desire.

And it’s no wonder why he’s so fascinated. The production design behind her creation is just incredible, blending human and machine in a way that is both believable and unique in the long history of the cinematic cyborg. Her face has this flawless skin that looks as if it has been hand-crafted from the softest material, but her body is a metal skeleton of gears and parts within a transparent ergonomic shell. It’s chillingly abject, not least because of Vikander’s fantastic performance. The sheer physicality of it is so great; bringing an almost balletic fluidity but restricted by a stillness and efficiency of movement that betrays the artifice beneath her humanity. She’s the iPod robot, almost like Eve from WALL-E. Her childlike eyes and inquisitive mannerisms convey an innate intelligence that the viewer can’t help but be drawn to, beyond her already extraordinary appearance.

For me though, the most fascinating character is Nathan. Likely drawing from the cliché of the anti-social tech genius turned multi-billionaire, Nathan is a fascinating and frustrating hotbed of contradictions. He often drinks to excess, perhaps accounting for some deep-seated loneliness or depression, but then pushes himself with vigorous exercise the next day. He adopts an easy-going swagger around Caleb, but this is surely a performance to disguise the effort he needs to retain his dominance over this private world he has created for himself, threatened by this invited intrusion. It is deliberate that Nathan has chosen this isolated Xanadu-like mansion as his own – his own private kingdom where he is head of state. He asserts his superiority over the others, dominating awkward conversations with Caleb through assertive comebacks and short phrases, and often walking around topless to expose his bulking physique in contrast to Caleb’s more spindly figure. At one point, Nathan berates Caleb for being too objective and rigid, using the metaphor of a Jackson Pollock painting to praise the benefits of spontaneity, yet completely ignoring his own calculating nature.

Overall, I read the film to be about the facets and features that define humanity, not necessarily in an innate self-aware sense, but in the ways that we perceive humanity in others and how we perform and define it to others and ourselves. Specifically, there is a gendered aspect to this claustrophobic chamber piece, namely a Battle of the Sexes conflict between what constitutes natural behaviours between men and women. Ava has been programmed by Nathan, yet you are led to question to what degree her personality has been written, to what extent she develops beyond Nathan’s techno-sexual fantasy come to life. She has a natural femininity, using subtle flirtation and a dry sense of humour in ways which one can’t perceive as having been created by the brusque Nathan. She tests Caleb with her sensuality as much as he tests her with his objective questioning. It reminded me on the one hand of Under the Skin, which used it’s outsider’s view to study perceived feminine behaviour and how others respond to it, and on the other of Her, which depicted another relationship between an AI female and human man. It wouldn’t be so easy as to say Ex Machina is a cautionary tale about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence (in the vein of The Terminator maybe?!) as the script regularly seems to depict the uglier side of humanity in a way which is hard to sympathise with.

Thankfully, Garland mostly avoids the problems with endings both 28 Days Later and Sunshine suffered, as both those films lost the careful atmosphere they had both created by descending into chaos in the final thirds. The restrictions of Ex Machina don’t allow this, although the film twists more away from the philosophical drama and mysteries of the start into a more conventional thriller, at times feeling like a fairly strange episode of Black Mirror. Yet the consistency of tone and Garland’s thoughtful directing make the overall film very satisfying. Despite the chilliness of the script and setting, the film even finds opportunities for humour, such as Ava’s witty flirting and even an unexpected impromptu dance scene. Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s score also adds to the uneasy feeling this film made in me (big ups too for having ‘Husbands’ by Savages playing over the end credits). Ex Machina has proven to be one of the most distinct and enjoyable films I’ve seen in a while.