Alicia Vikander as Ava
“EX MACHINA” My rating: B+
108 minutes | MPAA rating: R
The computer or robot that turns on its human creators is one of science fiction’s more popular tropes, sparking films as diverse as “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “The Terminator.”
“Ex Machina” offers one of the more disquieting takes on that idea, delivering a compact four-character pressure-cooker drama that leaves audiences convinced that the creation of artificial intelligence inevitably will lead to humanity’s destruction.
The directing debut of Alex Garland (the screenwriter behind “28 Days Later…” and “Sunshine”), unfolds on the remote estate of Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a Jobs-ian genius and multi-billionaire thanks to the Internet search engine he created at age 13.
We meet Nathan through Caleb (Domhall Gleeson), a lowly computer programer who has won a company-wide contest to spend a week with his boss. This is a very big deal, since Nathan has not made a public appearance in years and lives alone in a high-tech home/laboratory built into a mountainside near the Arctic Circle.
Caleb is what you expect from a computer programmer — smart and dweeby. Nathan, on the other hand, is a force of nature, a sort of scientific Paul
Domnail Gleeson and Oscar Isaacs
Bunyan with shaved head and Mennonite beard who, when he’s not playing mad scientist, is furiously lifting weights.
Early on Nathan — who works overtime to give the impression that he’s just one a normal dude — confides that Caleb is here to help him test his newest creation. It’s an android he calls Ava (Alicia Vikander), and he wants the programmer to perform a series of “Turing tests” — conversations with Ava from which Caleb will deduce whether she’s just a smartly programmed machine or a genuine individual capable of original thought and emotion.
Caleb is wowed by his first encounter with Ava, whose body consists of a mesh exoskeleton through which he can see her metal “bones” and the blinking lights of various hard drives. Her movements are accompanied by the hum of her internal hydraulics. Only her face, hands and feet have been covered with a material that approximates human flesh.
Over several days Caleb befriends Ava, who evolves from a sort of quiet diffidence to eager participant.
“Are you attracted to me?” she asks, remarking on “the way your eyes focus on my eyes and lips.”
When he’s not working with Ava, Caleb is sharing his impressions with Nathan, whose megalomania and need for control begin to take on threatening dimensions. (The only other person on the premises is a stoic Japanese woman — played by Sonoya Mizuno — who speaks no English and functions as Nathan’s housekeeper/love slave.)
When Nathan observes that the real breakthrough will come with the model after Ava, Caleb wonders: What will happen to Ava? Is she destined for the scrap heap?
And he begins hatching an escape plan for this machine he now loves.
The visuals here are exceptional, but the film is less about high-tech splash than about establishing a mood that gnaws at the viewer. “Ex Machina” feels like the old Charles Laughton movie “The Island of Lost Souls” (based on H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau), surely one of the creepiest efforts in Hollywood history.
The acting is off the charts. Gleeson is terrific as an accomplished tekkie and emotional newbie who doesn’t realize until it’s too late just how completely he’s been manipulated.
Isaacs is simultaneously amusing and threatening as the all-powerful Nathan. (Can this really be the same actor we saw in “Inside Llewyn Davis” and “A Most Violent Year”? The guy’s a freakin’ chameleon.) Late in the film he puts on a display of Travolta-esque disco dancing that is both very funny and seriously unnerving.
And Vikander, a Swedish ballerina, finds just the right balance of childlike simplicity, slow-burning eroticism, and fierce intelligence. She’s like a chess-playing program that’s always 50 moves ahead of its human competition.
It may be argued that in its last act “Ex Machina” paints itself into a corner from which there is no escape. But before that happens, this film piques our curiosity, lights up our imaginations, and sets our nerves a-tingling in ways that few other “robot” movies can match.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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