EX MACHINA – The Review

It’s hard to find smart, thought-provoking science fiction stories these days, with current trends dictating  bigger is better. Writer-Director Alex Garland’s EX MACHINA is small-scale, slow-paced, and breaks no new ground in terms of ideas. Yet thanks to a terrific script, exceptional characterizations, and one super-sexy robot, it’s the best new science fiction film I’ve seen since UNDER THE SKIN. Like Garland’s earlier scripts, which gave us fresh takes on the zombie genre (28 DAYS LATER) and the space-flight-to-save-the-earth genre (SUNSHINE), EX MACHINA takes a familiar sci-fi concept, in this case the replication of human presence via artificial means, and makes it new.

EX MACHINA tells the story of Caleb (geeky Domhnall Gleeson from UNBREAKABLE), a low-ranking worker bee at Bluebook, the world’s “biggest internet search engine”. The film opens with him winning an in-company competition for the opportunity to spend a week at the remote Bond-lairish estate of reclusive Bluebook founder Nathan. Once he’s arrived by helicopter, Caleb hesitantly agrees to sign “the mother of all non-disclosure agreements” and is put up in a basement room with no windows or handles on the door. Nathan had written the Bluebook code when he was just 13 and now twenty years later he’s a disco-dancing, weight-lifting weirdo, nicely played by Oscar Isaac as a childishly brooding drunk. “Have you heard of the Turing test?” Nathan asks Caleb, for what he really wants his employee to do is to spend time with his newest invention, the gorgeous robot Ava (Alicia Vikander) and to test her true intelligence. Pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing created a test in 1950 to examine a machine’s ability to present behavior indistinguishable from a human’s. Nathan wants Caleb to apply this test to Ava, who looks and acts like a real human being (except her midsection and forearms which are clearly robotic) and who seems to despise her maker. Aware she’s constantly monitored by Nathan’s cameras, Ava causes power outages to steal a few moments between polite small talk with Caleb about childhood memories to warn the lowly programmer not to trust the boss. Ava’s questions about the earlier versions of herself – whose sculpted, life masks line the walls of Nathan’s highly secured house – lead Caleb to suspect that she may soon be headed for the recycling bin. The more time he spends with Ava – who begins to express romantic feelings for Caleb – the more he becomes determined to rescue her from her mad inventor, especially after discovering Nathan’s disturbing collection of sexually fetishized robot corpses. Things get creepy when Nathan informs Caleb that Ava’s capable of sex – after all, he’s got his own foxy Asian paramour (Sonoya Mizuno) who he may or may not have created somewhere in his lab. It soon turns out that there’s an disturbing reason why the lowly programmer finds himself falling for Miss robot.

EX MACHINA is a classy slice of cerebral sci-fi with a literary-cinematic heritage stretching back through BLADE RUNNER and METROPOLIS to FRANKENSTEIN. Garland makes an impressive debut behind camera, effectively directing with remote, minimal style. Swedish actress Alicia Vikander excels in the film’s most important role as the sleek, sexy robot who struggles to come to terms with her humanity (or lack of it), giving a performance that’s more about intuition and gesture than dialogue. The only real special effect in the film is the presentation of Ava with a human face, but mostly composed of wires and a partly transparent body, and it’s seamless. An electro soundtrack by Geoff Barrow adds to the retro sci-fi air of EX MACHINA, a terrific film that is highly recommended.

4 1/2 of 5 Stars