Ex Machina

Ex Machina, the directorial debut of screenwriter Alex Garland, tells the story of Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a young computer programmer who wins a competition at the Google-like tech firm where he works. His prize is spending a week with the company's CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), a reclusive cybernetics genius who lives in a secluded fortress/lab/treehouse shrouded in secrecy. When Caleb arrives, he learns that Bateman has summoned him for a specific assignment: evaluating the consciousness and sentience of his latest invention, a sexy and emotionally impressionable cyborg named Ava (Alicia Vikander).

On the surface, this low-budget, almost single-location, near three-hander raises some interesting but nonetheless basic questions about Artificial Intelligence. It's the some of same ideas explored in prestige sci-fi pictures like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and Steven Spielberg’s A.I. as well as junky thrillers like Alex Proyas’s I, Robot, Wally Pfister’s Transcendence, and Gareth Edwards’ The Creator. Subtexturally, however, Ex Machina explores far more primal themes about how men relate to women. Exploring these ideas via a story set in the milieu of high-tech—a world dominated almost exclusively by aggressive young bros—makes these subtextual elements resonate without the director needing to underline them.

Vikander's performance is as complex and intriguing as the visual conception of Ava's robot physique. There's no sense that Vikander's smooth, youthful face has been clumsily grafted onto a CGI body, and every bit of the character's physicality feels authentically part of the gifted actress playing her. Just like Caleb, we are constantly trying to figure out if Ava is a sentient individual capable of developing feelings and thoughts or a simple machine programmed to apply all she's learned about human nature to reach her objective. That Ava is designed (and embodied by Vikander) as not only an alluring young woman but also a vulnerable, demure, almost childlike female taps into many base male instincts—not only around the desire to possess but also to protect. This instantly places viewers (especially straight male viewers) into the protagonist's perspective while we're simultaneously analyzing his reactions from the removed distance of the antagonist.

I wish Garland could have figured out a way of making Ava the film's most interesting character that didn't require writing both his male leads so banal. Gleeson, who was excellent in early roles like True Grit and Anna Karenina, essentially reprises the unexciting part he played in Lenny Abrahamson’s 2014 oddball melancholy comedy Frank. In that film, at least, Gleeson's passive wide-eyed innocence was offset by the titular character (Michael Fassbender playing a bandleader who sported a giant and bizarre papier-mâché head). But in Ex Machina, Gleeson shares all his scenes with either the opaque Ava or the tedious Nathan. Nathan is cryptic, odd-looking, and erratic, but that isn't enough to make him mysterious or threatening. Even though played by the talented and resourceful Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis, A Most Violent Year), Garland fails to make this off-putting character compelling. (Sorry, giving him a dance sequence doesn't fix this problem).

The movie unfolds almost like a play, and its theatrical qualities often work to its advantage, with each two-character exchange existing for just the right duration to introduce each new piece of information or idea. But the dialogue is sometimes wooden—or worse, not credible. At one key point, Nathan asks Caleb if he knows what the Turing test is. It's impossible to believe that a prize-winning computer whiz like Caleb might be unaware of Alan Turing's famous test for determining a machine's ability to impersonate a human convincingly; the clumsy line is included solely for the audience's edification, so passing it off as something one of these characters would ever say to the other feels false.

Garland, producer Andrew Macdonald, production designer Mark Digby, and cinematographer Rob Hardy make this modestly budgeted production look slick and shiny. But the movie would have benefited from a director more adept in the lost art of establishing cinematic geography. The picture takes place almost entirely inside Nathan’s laboratory and lair, which we might expect to feel grand and forbidding or, alternately, maze-like and claustrophobic. But we don't have much sense either way since barely any time or effort is spent showing us the compound's size and layout. As the action unfolds, we're meant to feel tense, trapped, and disoriented, but since Garland neglects to establish the surroundings fully, he fails to achieve these effects.

Similarly, the first twenty minutes of Ex Machina should create the spooky feeling of being lured into a terrifying but exhilarating unknown world—the way Edward Parker finds himself on Dr. Moreau’s island in Island of Lost Souls, or the crew of the Nostromo venture into the derelict spacecraft in Alien, or Clarice Starling descends into the bowels of the prison complex that holds Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. But no such eerie anticipation exists in the opening scenes of Ex Machina, all we feel is Caleb's uncertainty about how to react and behave with Nathan.

The less than stellar opening is unusual for Garland, who tends to pen scripts with intriguing premises and promising set-ups that implode by their third act: The Danny Boyle films 28 Days Later and Sunshine for example, or his slightly more absorbing adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. On first watch, I felt Ex Machina built to a predictable yet surprisingly underdeveloped climax, but I now see the ending as crafty and satisfying. Ex Machina can ultimately be seen less as a sci-fi movie and more as a revenge picture. The subtext is so deftly handled and the film's true themes so astutely woven that on first watch, I thought the film was juvenile and misogynistic. But subsequent viewings reveal sharp criticism of the young straight male preoccupations, obsessions, and behaviors that I, at first, thought the picture exemplified. Garland tricks us into thinking we're watching a sci-fi movie that asks the futuristic question: when should we start treating certain objects as people? But he may actually be asking the humanist question: when will we stop treating certain people as objects?