Erobotics

Ex Machina

Crit

Directorial debut for the novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland, who, among other accomplishments, wrote my favorite zombie film, is mostly a success, with a big disappointment in the late going. Obscenely rich and assholish tech genius (Oscar Isaac) brings a talented and naïve employee (Domhnall Gleeson) to his neverland estate to judge a modified Turing test: whether the artificial intelligence of the perversely sexy robot (Alicia Vikander) he has created has developed genuine consciousness.

Nathan is a jerk and Caleb seems sweet and Ava seems desperate and trapped and abused, so the deck is stacked: we want the Caleb-Ava romance to be real and to prevail. But because Nathan is in the position to--and has the clear inclination to--manipulate every pixel of Caleb's experience in this Xanadu, we're walking in very squishy perceptual and narrative sand: has Nathan really managed the godlike feat of creating subsequently independent consciousness? is it really Caleb who's being tested? is Ava attracted to him or playing him as a means of escape?

This last question is, it occurred to me at one point, a film noir question, and in the blank space below, I'm going to talk about that with spoilers aplenty. For those who haven't been here in a while, if you've seen the film or otherwise don't care about spoilers, use your cursor to select the invisible paragraphs and make the lemon-juice writing appear. But first, a bit about where the film goes wrong.

The narrative is structured into 7 "sessions" with Eva, and along about Session 5, the film lurches from a story of questions about questions to a clichéd explore-the-haunted-house-to-discover-its-secrets-without-getting-caught-in-the-act-and-then-make-our-escape movie. Yes, from a narrative standpoint those discoveries needed to be made, but I'm not convinced they needed to be made before the determination to escape: I think Caleb's love for Ava--less open to question that hers for him--would have been enough motivation, and the discoveries would have followed naturally in the unwinding of the escape plot. In the event, the narrative becomes hamhanded and unconvincing, and though in Session 7 we return to the sort of movie we were enjoying, some of the sloppiness spills over.

Nonetheless, a film I'll think about and talk about for a while, and I began talking about it w/ my movie companions right after the film (again, here be spoilers):

One friend, who is, I gather, conceptually invested in the notion of AI, was annoyed by what she found as a presentation of the technology as inherently evil--because Ava does, of course, in the tradition of the noir femme fatale she turns out to be, throw Caleb under the bus, after killing Nathan and before escaping on her own. Why, my friend wanted to know, was it necessary to kill him, and isn't that just kneejerk Luddism?

My reaction was much different: to me, Ava's willingness to do anything to preserve herself is beyond good and evil: it is simply human, meaning that Nathan has split the AI atom. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing for humanity is an altogether different question from whether AI itself is good or bad. Is fire a useful tool? Hell, yeah, but that doesn't mean Prometheus (or any of his intellectual descendants: Frankenstein, Oppenheimer) should expect to be rewarded for breaking the rules to activate that tool. Being God is risky fucking business.

And as to why Ava has to make sure Caleb takes the fall, see Sam Spade's last long speech to Bridgit O'Shaughnessy: from Ava's perspective, maybe Caleb loves her, and maybe she loves him. But out in the world, each will forever be a potential liability to the other. She may have a few bad nights afterward, but she'll be alive in a world of humans, not one of whom knows her dangerous truth, And her artificial intelligence must trump her artificial heart.

Trailers

• Amy--Oh, this may just be too hard to watch: Winehouse doc.
• Poltergeist--Every trailer we saw other than the first one was a reboot of a franchise: Terminator, Mad Max, this. This redo looks pretty pointless.