Ex Machina

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"Ex Machina"

"As Reported by Dollyforme"

Guess what comes out on Redbox July 14th? It Follows and Ex Machina. My favorite Movies of 2015, two modest budget indy movies that are amazing in every way.

We’ve already reviewed It Follows, so let’s review this movie. Well, to begin - it’s the story of a reclusive Internet gazillionaire (Oscar Isaac), a young coder (Domhnall Gleeson) plucked from obscurity and summoned to his mountain lair, and the gazillionaire’s new robot (Alicia Vikander), which he’s built to have a fully self-conscious mind (maybe) in a va-va-voom body.

Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is a talented young programmer in a major search-engine firm who wins a company contest to meet the reclusive CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). At Nathan's remote mountain home (the outdoor footage was shot in Norway), Caleb learns about the project Nathan has been perfecting: an android with the most advanced artificial intelligence ever made. The coder’s job is to decide whether the robot, named Ava, has true intelligence; but soon you start to wonder whether the Internet genius can be trusted—or Ava, for that matter.

Nathan wants Caleb to determine whether the A.I., who takes female form and is called Ava (and is portrayed by the Danish actress Alicia Vikander), has the capability of achieving consciousness — and whether that has happened already.

Through one-on-one sessions with Ava, Caleb begins to test whether this android has feelings and humanlike problem-solving skills. As the sessions get deeper and more personal, he also realizes that Ava's not the only one being tested — and that Nathan's not the only one doing the testing.

Writer-director Alex Garland — who wrote the novel "The Beach" and the screenplay for the zombie thriller "28 Days Later" — creates in his directorial debut a sleek, futuristic tale that raises brain-twisting questions about sexuality, identity and the increasingly blurry line between us and our machines. It's at once a thought-provoking drama and a pulse-quickening thriller.

It's also gorgeous to look at. Nathan's home/lab is all clean lines and spartan decor, clinically rendered by cinematographer Rob Hardy ("The Invisible Woman"). And the blend of motion-capture animation and mechanical effects used to render the semi-transparent Ava is stunning and seamless.

Gleeson ("About Time") is a strong average-Joe actor, a perfect conduit for the disbelieving audience. Isaac ("A Most Violent Year") is riveting as Nathan, hiding his Machiavellian plotting under a veneer of disarming dude-ness. And Vikander ("Seventh Son," "The Fifth Estate") gives a deftly calibrated performance that dances on that razor's edge between woman and machine.

By the end, "Ex Machina" reveals itself to be much like Ava: a product of great minds, cool and composed, and more emotionally complex than you might imagine.

Ex Machina is worth watching just as an exercise in suspense, creepy high-tech production design (the house is a cross between a 2001 spaceship and Superman’s Fortress of Solitude), and excellent acting (high-powered from Isaac, nuanced from Gleeson and Vikander). It’s of special interest, though, as part of a recent cinematic trend, in which men become attracted to, and perhaps victimized by, nonhuman things that appear to be women.

There's a surplus of intelligence, artificial and otherwise, in "Ex Machina," a futuristic thriller that's also a high-tech morality tale.

Ex Machina can’t live up to the very best film of this type, Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing Under the Skin; (my favorite movie of 2014 period) but it adds to the evidence that the Mechanical Bride, as we’ve known her from Tales of Hoffmann through Metropolis, has definitively changed. Men still think they want her for sex; but as she—it—surpasses them, what they’re really hoping for is a parting moment of pity.

So, maybe AVA is the Realdoll of the future, but maybe not a Realdoll I’d want to own.

Comments

Ok, you got me convinced, I´ll watch it. Chris

Thanks for the great review of this new film. I'll most likely buy this on blu ray to keep :)

Kharn

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