REVIEW: EX MACHINA

In the coming weeks this film will be considered a major disappointment by most viewers. They will say "yeah, it was alright," or "I thought it would be better." Do yourself a favor and don't listen to these people.

I know this will happen because I was a little let down as I walked out of the theater. But when I couldn't really put my finger on why such an amazingly acted, beautifully shot, delightfully twisted (and funny) film left such a "meh" taste in my mouth, I realized that the problem didn't lie in the film, but with my expectations. I expected another Sunshine. I thought it would get darker. Weirder. That there would be robot fighting. I don't know. But it doesn't go there, and it doesn't need to.

It's like a Kubrick film, just way less complicated. You can tell it's brilliant and immaculately constructed, it might even get you to feel an emotion or two, but you don't get that climactic rush that we've come to expect near the end of the film. We can't consume it like a "normal" movie, and that makes us want to disregard it or say "yeah, I thought it was pretty good I guess," and drop the topic altogether. It's really the biggest problem with the movie-going audiences today, which is of course symptomatic of the majority of the films that are being shown to us.

The climax here doesn't send a rush of blood to the head or anywhere else. Instead it's extremely uncomfortable. Even baffling. It's hard to explain without giving it all way, but suffice it to say that it requires just a tad more thought to comprehend, or get behind, than your average ending. Just a tad more. This is not a complicated film, but it is complicated in how it expresses fully its universal themes in so minimalistic a way. In many ways, almost every way in fact, it's retreading ground that science fiction has been stomping on (and lately beating to death) since Metropolis. But this film nails it, with a twist.

*LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD*

It's safe to assume that many people have guessed from the trailer that the character of Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the programmer of the A.I. named Ava, is not all right in the head. In fact, he's pretty fucked up. And of course, the big problem with that is that his character is essentially God.

And this, of course, isn't new. Movies have been portraying the creators of A.I. like narcissistic power-drunk jocks since I don't know when (with the exception of Chappie, which was really just upending the trope to be cute and didn't really have a clue why it was doing what it was doing. If that sentence makes it seem like I hated the film, well, good. I hated the film. Moving on). But never has a film portrayed it's god-like character so darkly. Delightfully so, in fact. A guy you would grab a beer with, but who is definitely depraved, and even worse, thinks everything he's doing is all good, yo. The irony is thick here. He creates A.I. because he accepts that it's the next step and because he has the necessary abilities, but he must distance himself from his creation in order to perfect it. He creates life but cannot fully appreciate it. It's the artist's paradox, dilemma, tragedy, what have you. Just a little more fucked up.

And then there's the Turing Test, the test an A.I. must go through to prove that it is indeed a consciousness. Here, Nathan's test of Ava, which includes Caleb, is an allegory for creationism. That's right, the test, not the simple act of making an A.I. (which is where many films are content to stop) is the allegory. Here it's all about the implications of the process of perfecting an artificial consciousness. The implications(I've been watching a lot of IASIP recently), meaning if there is actually a God, this film would say that that God is not divine, but evil, for that God would have created conscious beings akin to rats in cages, eternally testing their creation to determine whether it's smart enough to "get out." And yeah, that's all pretty evil and messed up. And expressed fully in this film with precise minimalism.

And finally, there's a film that understands that an A.I. wouldn't be solely interested in exterminating humans, but would most likely just want to live amongst us, in secret (hint hint). Which ties into another interesting point: if human-like A.I.'s weren't a secret, the world would go to hell in a hand-basket regardless of what A.I.'s decided to do with their power. People would go insane with paranoia (suggested in one haunting scene with Caleb). There would be A.I. rape (bet you never thought of that), A.I. crime, anarchy, and probably just a whole crap-load of really messed up stuff. Finally there's a film that says, definitively, that making A.I. (at least A.I. automatons) is a very, very bad idea, simply because they would exist.

Like I said, it's not a terribly complicated film, but it's brilliant in it's simplicity, has a solid point of view, and some pretty nuanced things to say about the future of technology, all while being fucking gorgeous (the special effects alone are chillingly realistic) to look at, and yes, even funny. Oscar Isaac is one hell of an actor.