There is no Deus here, no, we just got the Ex Machina.
In case you didn’t know, Deus Ex Machina (god from the machine) is a plot device where some outside force just kind of appears, fixes the issue, and leaves. It is usually a badly written plot device, Greece/Roman plays are full of these types of things where literally the gods came down and did some stuff.
And just to reiterate, this movie is the phrase without the god part. So just “From the Machine”. A movie about robots.
Maybe even robots kind of just appearing, fixing the issue, and leaving. That’d be swell.
I don’t think I can bore up this intro anymore so I should just get right to it!
Put on your thinking face and get to movie watching.
To err is human. To compute is robot.
Humans and robots don’t really interact nowadays on any level that isn’t a slave/owner relationship. Right now, robots have it rough.
Related, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) totally just won a prize. He is a coder for Bluebook, the Google of this movie, and he has won a week to spend with their reclusive CEO on his giant resort island thing. Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the CEO, has turned his home into a secret underground facility, to test out new technologies and prepare for the next big technical revolution and he is very secretive.
Nathan wants Caleb to perform the Turing test on something he is working on. In the test, a human asks a robot questions, without knowing whether they are talking to a human or a robot. And if the human cannot determine what it is, the robot/AI passes the test! But err, knowing you are doing that kind of ruins the point you would think. Hell, being introduce to Ava (Alicia Vikander), and seeing her in a robot body also probably puts a hamper on the basics for the test.
Maybe. JUST MAYBE. There is more going on in this facility that Nathan isn’t telling Caleb. Maybe things are more than just the Turing test. Maybe! Who knows? That Asian maid, Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) who doesn’t know English and is the only other person in the whole facility? Yeah, probably. Bet she has seen some shit.
If you thought the elevator scene from Captain America was bad ass, wait til you see this action fest!
I think Ex Machina is the type of movie you just want to watch with someone else. There are a lot of themes present, and since I watch the majority of my movies alone, the only people I can talk about those themes with are you guys.
But then I’d be a silly spoil sport.
Instead, let me instead make sure you realize this is a sci-fi drama. That means we are going to have a lot of talking and not a lot of action, and I wouldn’t want you to go into this thinking otherwise (like a dumb ass).
The discussions and the twists that went into the film were pretty enjoyable. I went in assuming I would be able to see everything coming a mile away and I think that most of my predictions did not end up coming true. So it is great to see it not go down the obvious path.
The three main actors involved all did an excellent job. It is now expected of Isaac to provide quality, but Gleeson is still not super tested and Vikander of course is out of nowhere (in comparison). The story the film tells can be interpreted in several different ways, depending on who is watching the film, which will provide excellent discussions.
At the end, I felt as though it was still a bit too slow and not as grandiose as I had expected. That is of course my fault, not the films. Ex Machina is a wonderful addition to the Sci-Fi genre and one loves of that and drama should definitely seek out.