Fans awaiting “The Avengers: Age of Ultron” should find “Ex Machina” a suitable placeholder.
But where the “Avengers” sequel is likely to be bluntly predictable every step of the way, “Ex Machibna,” a spare and provocative thought experiment, floats like a butterfly among an array of possibilities before picking its poison.
Films about artificial intelligence usually check certain boxes. Here those include: although the life-like creation is made in the image of man, it looks like a (beautiful) woman; and she’s not intrinsically bad, she’s just programmed that way.
Ava,” the AI – played by Alicia Vikander – has been built by a reclusive software magnate played by Oscar Isaac in his glass-walled “Island of Dr. Moreau,” an Edenesque test tube of a laboratory in a remote mountain range. (It was filmed in Norway.)
We meet him and her through the perspective of a shy programmer played by Domhnal Gleeson who works at Isaac’s software firm. He is there to give Ava the Turing test, which is used as a way to determine if responses to questions being posed are generated by a human or a machine.
That Gleeson already knows she is a machine means that Isaac is after something else.
And so, it turns out, is Ava. What that is slowly becomes apparent during the multiple sessions between Ava and her visitor, the glass wall separating them scarred by a small fracture left unexplained. Ava has a prosthetic human face, and sheath-like material covers her breasts and groin. The rest of her is clear as glass through which her machinery can be seen. The computer generated result is eerily realistic.
Just as important are Gleeson’s meeetings with Isaac’s arrogant and manipulative genius, an intense, crude heavy drinker whose eccentricities are like sleight of hand that mask his intentions.
And it all plays out inside an intimately oppressive labyrinth, a life-size rat’s maze.
“It’s not cozy,” Isaac declares. “It’s claustrophobic.”
Like the “less is more” horror film “It Follows,” the film’s spare aesthetic amplifies the growing menace. By the time what the characters don’t see and can’t know declares itself, it’s upon them.
“Ex Machina” takes enough turns through its sterile corridors to lose the most astute observer. And even if it doesn’t outfox you, its visual distractions are persuasive.
First time director Alex Gardner is a novelist and collaborator of Danny Boyle, for whom he wrote the zombie film “28 Days Later…” and the space odyssey “Sunshine.”
Giving the AI a female form, may smack some of misogyny, but it is actually a primal and careless misstep by her creator, that ends up revealing more about him than it does of her.
*** Three Stars
With Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander, Sonoya Mizuno. Produced by Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich. Rated R, nudity, language, violence. Approximate running time: 108 minutes.
Tags: Alex Garland, Alicia Vikander, Ex Machina Posted by