Ex Machi­na

This direc­to­r­i­al debut from nov­el­ist and screen­writer Alex Gar­land is per­haps more inter­est­ing as a study of Mil­len­ni­al super­brains-turned-entre­pre­neurs than it is a spec­u­la­tive explo­ration into the future of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Gar­land has said in inter­views that his film has been inspired, dra­mat­i­cal­ly at least, by Joseph Mankiewicz’s chilly, mano-y-mano cham­ber piece, Sleuth, from 1972, but in fact it has more in com­mon with Stephen Spielberg’s Juras­sic Park, right down to its numer­ous visu­al homages.

To para­phrase Ian Mal­com, it’s about peo­ple being so pre­oc­cu­pied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should. But it also offers a more lev­el-head­ed and affir­ma­tive twist on that poten­tial­ly alarmist premise.

We meet Oscar Isaac’s Nathan in his Scan­do-like futuro stack. He is shirt­less while busy prac­tic­ing his hay­mak­ers on a punch bag — a por­tent for things to come. He’s a youth­ful tech whiz who is the smartest guy in the room, the build­ing, the state, the con­ti­nent and, quite pos­si­bly, the world. He hand picks Domh­nall Gleeson’s pup­py-dog code-jock­ey Caleb to join him in this off-map locale to exe­cute the ​‘Tur­ing Test’ on a humanoid robot named Ava (Ali­cia Vikan­der) in order to deter­mine whether she has achieved any lev­el of human sentience.

As expect­ed, this doesn’t turn out to be the rosy mini-break of intel­lec­tu­al and pro­fes­sion­al tran­scen­dence that Caleb thought it might be, his every move appar­ent­ly antic­i­pat­ed by the wily Nathan who appears to be test­ing him as he tests Ava. And then you have Ava, whose response to Caleb’s inter­ro­ga­tions aren’t always as expect­ed — so the film con­cerns the fluc­tu­at­ing pow­er rela­tion­ship between these three characters.

It’s a clas­si­cal set-up, and as with its slinky android pro­tag­o­nist, Gar­land makes it very easy (too easy?) to see all the cogs, pul­leys and gears of his plot­ting. The prob­lem is that, often when events are occur­ring off cam­era and the char­ac­ters believe they’re get­ting one up on their com­pa­tri­ots, Gar­land often as good as tells us that all is not what it seems. So final act expla­na­tions arrive as more of a for­mal­i­ty than a surprise.

Though the film boasts some lux­u­ri­ant, crisp effects work that puts many sim­i­lar­ly-inclined Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tions to shame, it still ends up com­ing across as some­thing of a mod­est film. Gar­land is clear­ly inter­est­ed in pick­ing apart the meta­phys­i­cal quan­daries that come from arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, though is con­sis­tent­ly weighed down by a lead­en, tricksy plot which nev­er real­ly convinces.

The moral­i­ty of AI is dis­cussed in depth, though the film ends up fudg­ing its thoughts on whether a gen­er­a­tion of fac­to­ry-built humans would ulti­mate­ly be a good or a bad thing. The film cli­max­es on a sat­is­fy­ing note of ambi­gu­i­ty — you almost wish that Gar­land had start­ed his film at this point rather than end­ed it.