Artificial intelligence. It’s the hot button topic in science fiction movies these days. We live in a time when we’re more vulnerable to being watched than ever (Bill Gates is reading this review as I type it, no doubt) and our phones are smarter than us.
Where’s it all headed?
It’s almost hard to imagine that there ISN’T some nut somewhere today working on building a human out of microchips, wires and latex prosthetics like a plausible modern day Frankenstein. In eras past, when we were more wary of technology, a Conquering Machine, a Frankenstein’s Monster, was all that the movies needed to get going. Today though, films are more likely to also implicate human susceptibility in the game. The machines charm us. They talk to us when no one else will. They love us in a world that doesn’t even notice us. Some of us might even fall in love back.
Spike Jonze’s Her played this for offbeat romantic-comedy, fractured in fifteen places and ultimately sad.
Alex Garland’s Ex Machina plays it as a dark-hearted techno-noir, where an isolated billionaire technical genius’s antiseptic country estate is as threatening as any nighttime city street. Many of its pivotal moments happen when the lights are out. We trust no one. There’s also a fall guy, a femme fatale and a big creep. There’s no room for happiness here, even in a house the size of an airport. If their machines don’t kill these people, their loneliness will.
Oscar Isaac is the big cheese inventor with a bank account that could buy the moon, a brain that could conquer nations and a gaping void in his heart that he fills with alcohol and robot sex. He secludes himself in a sea of green (money and many, many, many acres of foliage) and we’re sure that he’s plenty brain-damaged from it all. Isaac plays him as a ticking time-tomb who reminds us of every big-talking liar we’ve ever known. He tries to charm us, but we know to never turn our back on him. It’s a beautifully creepy performance from an actor who’s Oscar-bound for some part in the future, if not this one (too bleak a film for the Academy).
Domhnall Gleeson is your regular Millennial pencil-neck with a tech job and no girlfriend and whom we strongly suspect to be a virgin. He’s a ripe worm ready to be scooped up by a big bad bird.
Alicia Vikander is the big-eyed beautiful girl who just happens to have been created in a laboratory. How is electricity and programming any different from a sperm and an egg, she (and the film) argues. And how can we contradict that sweet face?
This is finely made pessimism, arthouse sci-fi that isn’t afraid to take it slow (and yet is filled with beautiful economy—its opening ten minutes is a wonder of compact characterization). Death is around every corner and we barely trust our hero to tie his shoes right. Anything that humans touch goes bad. The road to hell is paved with brilliant inventions.