While we all wait patiently for Ridley Scott to serve up his long-promised sequel to 1982’s Blade Runner, consider a perfectly fine recent entry into the artificial intelligence genre, Ex Machina, written and directed by sometime Philippines visitor and Brit novelist Alex Garland.
Ex Machina concerns the next wave of robots, a subject that’s been much on people’s minds lately, what with drone technology and movies like Her positing an A.I. that begins to think and evolve faster than we do. Nobody wants to be left on the dustbin of history, and just as Scott’s dystopian sci-fi imagined a world where “skin jobs” try to avoid detection in a fractured human world on the downslide, Ex Machina focuses on how those artificial humans come into being.
When Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a coder for the world’s largest search engine company, Bluebook, is picked to assist his boss Nathan (Oscar Isaac) at his remote retreat and laboratory, he doesn’t know what the job entails. It soon becomes clear: Nathan, a pugnacious, prickly genius, has been developing robots with brains that mimic ours. He wants Caleb, who’s fluent in various computer codes, to administer a “Turing test.”
(This is the same sort of test Replicants Leon and Rachael received in Blade Runner — a questionnaire meant to weed out the skin jobs from the humans. Interestingly, it was British code breaker Alan Turing, depicted in last year’s The Imitation Game, who was responsible for much of our understanding of how computer technology would evolve, requiring such “safeguards” in the future.)
Caleb is to give his test to Ava (Alicia Vikander), a synthetic being designed by Nathan who is locked away behind a glass panel in his concrete-encased bunker. She’s an inquisitive sort of robot, with her big, soulful eyes and exposed circuitry. Caleb’s task is to pose questions that her artificial brain will not be able to answer. Nathan, we quickly discover, is not the kindest Creator ever: he’s abusive to his robot helpers; he even offers to pimp out Ava to Caleb — if he’s sufficiently curious about her sexual circuitry.
Ex Machina owes a lot to Blade Runner, Frankenstein, The Stepford Wives and the Myth of Prometheus, but it manages its own sleek, smart look. The concrete bunker is set far away in Nathan’s mountain retreat. Caleb initially balks at signing a non-disclosure agreement, and at the lack of windows in his underground domicile. “You’d be amazed how many people want to get a look at what goes on inside here,” Nathan explains to Caleb. The interiors grow increasingly creepy and Kubrickian as we, too, discover what Nathan’s been up to in his bunker.
Garland, who wrote The Beach after exploring Southeast Asia’s backpacker scene (including Philippine locales), imagines quite another nightmarish paradise here: Nathan’s A.I. creations are drop-dead gorgeous female models, but they — like the Replicants in Blade Runner — have an expiration date: they will be trashed, recycled and replaced when he comes up with better modifications. “Ava is part of a continuum,” as Nathan blithely explains. “Version 9.6, and so on; each time they get a little better.”
Understandably, this does not sit well with Ava, who starts to gain Caleb’s confidence as the Turing test progresses. As her A.I. advances, she begins to crave the things that make us human: wearing dresses, having a relationship, making aesthetic choices — even the simple act of standing in a crowded intersection, watching all the people go by.
Nathan, the wily genius behind a world-conquering search engine (think Google combined with Facebook), is no lovable nerd: Isaac plays him as bullying, misogynist, suspicious and a heavy drinker. Caleb, meanwhile, is the usual Garland stand-in: a young Brit with floppy nerd hair, the typical fixations (“Did you use Bluebook to research my porn preferences?” he demands of Nathan at one point), and always one step behind the other characters.
The movie raises interesting questions without really troubling to answer them, such as: if we do create robots that are almost human, what role will they have in society? Will they become our servants? Sex slaves? Fellow citizens? Nathan is unbothered by such moral implications, simply concerned with making a better model. “It’s Promethean, man,” he drunkenly mumbles to Caleb at one point — referencing the mythical Greek who stole fire from the gods and was duly punished.
Garland says he’s been playing around with this A.I. theme for decades. After writing things like 28 Days Later and The Beach, the Brit seems to have settled into his dream of bringing graphic novel concepts to the big screen. (Ex Machina was a modest-sized hit, made on a modest budget.)
More to the point, it explores a theme that will probably become more commonplace as the next decade or so unfolds: what place smart technology will have in our lives — whether it’s driving us around or communicating with us constantly through smart watches, tablets and phones — until we reach a point known as “singularity.” That’s when artificial intelligence advances to a point where it’s capable of overtaking us on our own chessboard.
Think back. HAL in 2001 might have been relatively easy to shut down — all astronaut Dave Poolman needed to do was yank out a few circuit boards. And in Blade Runner, set in a fictional 2019 Los Angeles, all Deckard needed to be was a quick draw. But what about when technology is invited into our homes, our cars and our lives on a personal level?
When technology is smart enough to seduce us completely, Ex Machina asks, will it be too late to stop it?