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Ex Machina – A great slice of smart, modern sci-fi

22nd January 2015 By Tim Isaac


Cinema has a long history of grappling with the big AI – Artificial Intelligence – question, and even sexy robots, which go back as far as Metropolis. So there is much to do if you want to say anything original and dramatic, but much to writer/director Alex Garland’s credit he pretty much pulls it off here, even if the double crosses at the finale become a little predictable.

The set up and execution are perfect. Domnhall Gleeson is a techie nerd who wins an office competition to meet the head honcho, Oscar Isaac, in his huge country estate. Isaac is a cross between Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, hugely wealthy and a control freak constantly working out to see off his many hangovers. His dream is to build a robot which passes the Turin test – that is, a machine that an unsuspecting person would believe to be human. However here’s the twist, he asks Gleeson to see if Ava (Alicia Vikander) passes the test even though she is clearly a robot, with see-through limbs and scaly metallic skin.

Gleeson suspects he is being used as an experiment just as much as Ava is, and he is right – Isaac has a devilish plan, but it is going to take much teasing out before it all comes to fruition. Meanwhile there is a fourth person in the plot, Isaac’s maid, a Japanese sex kitten who apparently doesn’t speak English. Is she being held as a slave too?

As Gleeson delves further into Ava’s psyche he starts to fall for her charms – after all, she is one sexy robot, with human eyes and lips and a soothing voice. He decides to plot to escape the huge estate with her, but with Isaac watching everything on screens that won’t be easy.

Garland has great fun here, both with the special effects and the set up, but he uses it to ask real questions about the speed that technology is advancing. We’ve seen this before in many films, most effectively Blade Runner to whom this owes a debt, but here it is more playful while retaining a real sense of menace. What happens when a man falls for a robot? Are we genetically set up to find certain types attractive or can it be input? Can you alter your feelings on the basis of personality alone? All these themes are explored satisfactorily, while woven into the script are references to Prometheus, Oppenheimer, but not Frankenstein for some reason.

An early exchange sets the tone between Gleeson and Isaac perfectly. The naive Gleeson mumbles something about ex machina, or ‘from the gods’ (the full idiom is ‘deus ex machina’, which means ‘gods from the machine’, a reference to how gods often came to sort out the plot and provide a conclusion in some Ancient Greek theatre), which effectively Isaac has done, and he takes the quote and runs with it – an ego out of control and dangerously on the brink.

The performances are pitch perfect, as Isaac finally puts his dead-eyed stare to good use and reveals a surprising sense of humour, previously well hidden. Gleeson is fine as the young geek, while Vikander gets away with her strange accent as she is a robot – who knows what accent they have? Her slow sexualisation, putting on clothes rather than taking them off and fantasising of a date on a traffic junction so that she can people watch, is brilliantly done and surprisingly moving.

Overall verdict: With a cracking twist at the end this is a film with a limited palette but which uses it to full effect. One of the best sci-fi films for ages, with a real emotional kick.

Reviewer: Mike Martin

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