Alicia Vikander as Ava in Alex Garland's 'Ex Machina'
It's a tale as old as dirt. Man plays God and creates life in our own vision. Some see the creation as tools to do with as we please, while others empathize and have feelings for the new creation. But sooner or later, things get complicated.
This is the basis for Alex Garland's film, Ex Machina, which both examines these issues in very intelligent ways and also falls into Hollywood cliches. The biggest of those cliches is a fear of discovery leading to disaster, which runs through a LOT of stories over the past few thousand years. This is usually a truism, since stories are predicated on conflict, and most times it would get pretty boring if what the characters discovered was sweet dreams and sunbeams. However, it's interesting to examine how far this particular notion extends.
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A hunger to know things is a common theme in literature and mythology, but it's been balanced over thousands of years with messages that the pursuit of knowledge may destroy paradise. In a lot of stories, curiosity is treated as almost a "sin," since the pursuit of knowledge and the discovery of truth usually signifies the loss of innocence. The Bible uses this trope with the temptation of "The Tree of the knowledge of good and evil." And Greek mythology has both Pandora and her box and Prometheus and his gift of fire. Reams could and probably have been written on the effect to Western civilization of having two big cultural myths that blamed women for bringing evil and suffering into the world, and how that corresponds to ideas about sexual innocence and moral purity.
If you look at a good portion of the work out there, there is more than a fair share of Luddite tendencies that runs through a lot of it. Even though science fiction deals with possibilities and all the wonder that may be, it also has a habit of tempering that notion with a lot of paranoia and suspicion of advanced technology and its application, whether it be the aliens that may be out to enslave us, or the genetic engineering turning us all into zombies.
For example, in the science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, there's an interesting dichotomy with nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons and nuclear energy become both our greatest hope and the greatest threat to civilization. Within a lot of stories, nuclear weapons are humanity's trump card against whatever threat we might be facing. And yet, something nuclear might also be the cause of genetic mutations or whatever accident that creates the hideous monster that's killing people one by one.
- Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has at its core a fear that science and technology are encroaching on the territory of the gods, hence the novel's subtitle: The Modern Prometheus.
- James Cameron's Terminator, Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, and the Colossus series by Dennis Feltham Jones all deal with man destroying itself by making machines too smart.
- In Frank Herbert's Dune, one of the highest laws is a prohibition on thinking machines. Thousands of years before the events of the book, humanity fought a religious "jihad" against the machines that caused a state of apathy and ruled their lives.
- One of the defining aspects of Star Trek is its theme of technology and science being mediums through which people will be united. The development of Warp Drive is a seminal moment for humanity in the overall story, and Data's (Brent Spiner) story is usually used to comment on the human condition and test the boundaries of "human" rights. But the franchise takes a negative view of genetic engineering ("Khhhhaaaannnn!").
- In Ronald D. Moore's re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, the characters eventually embrace spirituality, and come to believe "God has a plan" for them and the universe. They must reject technology in order to have a chance at unity and peace.
- Spike Jonze's Her is an aversion of this particular trope. The relationship between the artificial intelligence Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) and Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is used as a metaphor for relationships where one partner is moving forward and the other is stuck in a rut. Instead of taking over the world when they gain sapience, the machines just become another form of life sharing the planet with us.
Ex Machina is a stylish thriller with smart ideas that has elements of
The Island of Doctor Moreau. But ultimately it loses something in the final act. The film concerns a brilliant inventor and tech mogul, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), who decides to test his latest advancement in artificial intelligence, the android Ava (Alicia Vikander), by bringing one of his employees (Domhnall Gleeson) to a secluded compound to run a variation of the
Turing test. In the standard Turing test, a human interacts with someone, not knowing if the person on the other end is human or not, and the test is whether the human can tell if it's a machine. In this instance, the film presents a situation where the human is given the knowledge that he's interacting with a machine, but asks whether the interaction will be enough for a human to overcome bias and treat it as a conscious being worthy of respect.
Neill Blomkamp's Chappie covered similar territory earlier this year, but did it in a really nonsensical way. Most of Chappie doesn't even make sense on the surface. But this is where Ex Machina is at its most interesting. For example, instead of just being stuff for the NSA to search through, the artificial intelligence in the film is a creation of internet metadata. Nathan is the head of a company that sounds like a merging of Google and Facebook, and Ava's personality is based on the collective searches and likes of everyone on the internet, so she can better interact and know the needs of people. However, this sort of advancement raises all sorts of ethical issues. If something is created to think and reason ("Cogito, ergo sum"), would it then be wrong to condemn a thinking machine to an existence of servitude and what could be argued as a high-tech form of slavery? Or no matter how advanced it may become, would it always be a tool, running a program? With Ava's design, there's an implicit notion that the idea of creating an artificial "perfect woman," who's also disposable, has some very misogynistic notions.
Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb and Oscar Isaac as Nathan
Oscar Isaac is great as the film's iteration of the mad scientist, Vikander exhibits just the right mix of childlike innocence, strangeness, and enigma, while Gleeson hits his mark with a character that's both smart and naive. And writer/director Garland, who wrote the novel
The Beach and the screenplays for Danny Boyle's
28 Days Later and
Sunshine, uses color and setting to create an unsettling mood. A common theme in Garland's work, which is also present here, is his characters trying to create a small society of their own, and trying to carve out and control a piece of their world to operate under new rules. Here it's done by a 1 percenter building highly advanced, claustrophobic glass and steel cages surrounded by a green lush wilderness, inhabited by only two men and machines.
However, where the film strays off the rails is in its ending. It can't resist turning the story into a thriller, with people running down hallways. Just as Garland's Sunshine swerves at the end to become a totally different movie, so does this one.