Ex Machina (2015) Review

Ex Machina is another AI think piece that hits all the usual notes you’d expect from such a film: “Do robots have feelings?”, “Can robots become like humans?”, “Is it ethical to create conscious machines, and if so what the heck do we do with them?” As such it can be easy to dismiss Ex Machina. It’s not really saying anything new, and even the feminist angle of all the AI’s being designed to look like beautiful women who look also function as sex robots for their creator isn’t that original.

But what I do like about Ex Machina is that it’s a quiet film. The scale and scope are right down low, with the whole thing taking place in a lab in the woods. There’s only four characters, but I’d wager that one of them is so quiet that you’re tempted to correct me by saying there’s three. So quiet, literally in that she cannot speak and by the design of the story, is Kyoko that it’s easy to forget her role in the film is so pivotal that the ending might have been entirely different without her. She is programmed to be a house servant and cannot attack or harm her creator, Nathan, but by extending a knife and allowing him to ignorantly back into it as he wrestles with his other creation, Ava, she demonstrates real agency that facilitates Ava’s escape.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The film is about a billionaire named Nathan getting one of his company employees, Caleb, to test whether or not his AI android, Ava, is passable as a human, even after the employee knows they’re not a human being. In a twist reveal at the end, it turns out the real test was whether Ava could exhibit the human characteristics necessary to facilitate an escape plan by manipulating Caleb. Sure enough, she did. And though Nathan thought because he was in control of the test, and knew she would use Caleb to escape that he could prevent it, it turns out Caleb is an even better manipulator than Nathan and carried out his plan a night before Nathan knew he was going ahead with anything. There’s a lot of spinning plates.

Ex Machina gets better the more you watch it, in a similar way to watching a murder mystery film might be. You’re watching the plates spin on who is manipulating who, when they’re doing it and how. Nathan is a larger than life billionaire, an Elon Musk stand-in, who writes down profound quotes an awe-struck Caleb speaks about him and then exaggerates them further to boost his ego. He controls all. Caleb is a stereotypical good boy, with good morals and an open mind who is just begging to be manipulated all over the place first by Nathan, and then by Ava. Ava herself is first vulnerable in how she flirts with Caleb to try and desperately form a connection with him, and later much more cold when she realises that through Caleb she can also hurt Nathan. In the end she leaves alone, and traps Caleb in the facility so he cannot stop or go with her.

I think this leads to the misconception that Ava was self-interested and malicious the whole time, without a care in the world for Caleb. But I don’t think that’s true, personally. She clearly does not lie to him in everything she says, as she often acts on things she tells him or he requests of her. She is also attempting to gauge who he is as a person: Does he support her confinement for the purposes of science, as Nathan does, or will he recognise her suffering and help her escape? Though Caleb is acting on a good instinct to help a victim from confinement, I interpreted that Ava left him behind because there was still some discriminatory barrier there. He acknowledged she was a victim, could feel, and had suffered as though she were a human, but he still views her as a machine and talks to and about her in such a way from the start of the film, right to the end. He also shows no regard or intention on helping Kyoko after she reveals her android nature to him because he isn’t attracted to her and she cannot speak to him the way that Ava can. Ava, to Caleb, is a prize and she rejects that perception of herself by leaving Caleb behind.

Maybe I’m just a great big dork, but unravelling the layers of manipulation and motives as the days go by in the story is why the film is good, and why its ending is so interesting despite the fact the plot really isn’t that original on the surface. Kyoko is a fun character to observe on a rewatch. Shots of her tilting her head to eavesdrop on conversations, the scenes she decides to make herself present for and the ones she decides not to. I’ve seen it argued she is the reason Ava didn’t let Caleb leave with her, after she finds her way into Ava’s testing chamber.

The film is a miniature miracle too, I think. So much of the dialogue is 100% cringe. But it’s played off so well by the cast – Oscar Isaac as Nathan frequently having to find a way for his character to absorb Caleb’s dumb profound quotes about his work and doing so in a way that is funny, but not in a way that takes you out of the film. Alicia Vikander as Ava plays a lot of the role as though Ava were a child: You can’t quite tell if her character is doing it for Caleb’s benefit or for her own.

Would I recommend Ex Machina? I would. I think it’s a good piece of drama and a quietly effective thriller, despite there not being any new ideas being put forward on the whole AI discussion.