Above: Alicia Vikander is Ava in Mr. Garland's film. Photo ©Universal Pictures,
Film4, and DNA Films
Thrum. That is the noise of the score for “Ex
Machina”—sustained, gyrating electronic beats, prolonged until they vibrate
painfully in your ears. The music is the
(sublime) work of composers Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury. Yet it’s also a symptom of director Alex
Garland’s lushly queasy storytelling. With
nigh effortless grace, he has created a dread-seeped saga of technological
omnipotence, yet with none of the harried skittering of a Google search. His movie is pure, smoothly-modulated unease.
In chief, “Ex Machina” is a robot movie, albeit one with
some nimble human actors. Like Richard
Curtis and Lenny Abrahamson before him, Mr. Garland calls upon Domhnall Gleeson
to play an affably skinny nerd—in this case, Caleb, a dopily excitable computer
programmer ushered into the home of a mysterious entrepreneur and scientist known
only as “Nathan” (Oscar Isaac).
A practiced connoisseur of cool, Nathan has no use for
dowdy white lab coats; he strides through his glass-walled estate wearing a stylishly
sweaty gray tank top, pounding the occasional punching bag with audible
force. He’s a genial fellow (one who ends
every other sentence with “man” and “dude”), but Mr. Isaac adds a touch of fury
to his eyes. You never doubt that venom
haunts Nathan’s extravagantly friendly facade.
But “Ex Machina” is not really about Nathan; in fact,
it’s not really about Caleb either. What
truly commands our heroes’ eyes (and ours) is Ava (Alicia Vikander), a robot
who Nathan has asked Caleb to test. Is
she truly intelligent? Self-aware
even? Nathan believes Caleb can find the
answer.
How though? When
you look at Ava, you see right through her.
Ms. Vikander, her face superimposed onto a digital body, looks like a
mass of electronic gears with a beautiful woman’s face glued to their
surface. “Are you attracted to me?” she
asks Caleb. Mr. Gleeson’s fretfully
aroused face answers that question far better than words could.
And so begins the core of “Ex Machina.” The movie is divided into “sessions” (during
which Caleb interviews Ava)—sessions that quickly go off script. “You’re wrong about Nathan,” Ava says with suave
anger. “He isn’t your friend.” And as mysterious power outages bathe the
house in red light and Nathan lustfully downs bottles of liquor, you can
practically see incumbent horror lurking on the edge of each carefully-composed
frame.
I drank every ounce of this morbidity with voracious glee,
hungry to discover what kind of conspiracy Caleb had stumbled into. Yet I felt underwhelmed by the movie’s
denouement. Late in the film, Caleb stares
into a mirror, convinced that somehow, he might be just as robotic as Ava. That possibility revs “Ex Machina” to wade deep
into the waters of the surreal. Yet the
film never does; its savage, pulpy climax is a yet another bland warning about
the perils of rapidly advancing technology.
Still, Mr. Garland (who also wrote the film) offers points
worth probing. In the movie’s opening
scene, we see Caleb grinning before computer screen as he discovers that he’s
been invited to chez Nathan.
Immediately, congratulations flow in—on his iPhone. And even after Caleb meets Nathan, the
outside world might as well not exist.
Nathan’s carefully cultivated home, amassed with gadgets and views of
trees and mountains as flatly pretty as screensavers, is an oasis of
detachment, a descendant of the lonely world born of Facebook. “Was there a party?” Caleb inquires when he
arrives to find Nathan punching off a hangover.
The answer is clear from Nathan’s face: stupid question.
Of course, science fiction movies often say more through
their narrative flourishes than their wordily expressed ideas. And as I walked out of “Ex Machina,” pulse racing,
I felt haunted less by its thoughts on humanity and technology than by its seductive
aura of dread, by the images of Caleb questioning Ava, terrified and
intoxicated at the same time.
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