I liked it, but not as much as all of you. Reminded me of a Black Mirror episode (the one with the same actor), which is a good thing.
I haven’t seen the movie. I did watch the trailer.
Compared to all the other recent films that have come out of Hollywood, this one certainly seems to be very fresh and interesting and beautiful looking.
I won’t post anything more for fear of spoiling anything - even though I can’t see how I could spoil anything since I don’t know anything. But I suppose I can’t be too careful.
Thanks Red for posting this thread.
I saw it a couple of hours ago. I was wondering about what seemed a flaw in the plot. (I’ll use a spoiler box despite the thread title.)
Ava mentioned that she recharged via induction plates in the floor. So how was she recharging once she left?
Just saw it today. I really enjoyed it. The acting was superb, the plot kept me guessing, and I loved the ending. Definitely the best movie I’ve seen in theaters in a long while.
I agree that the trailer should be avoided by the plague. It definitely gives away several major plot points and just generally felt a bit clunky, like it didn’t do the film justice. It does get a couple of bonus points for using John Murphy’s 3:59am from Anonymous Rejected Film Score, which is a great album that you should be listening to right now.
Nonsense!
She could just buy a bunch of these. Seriously though, I’m sure she figured out something quickly; it would have been high on her list of priorities. She could very well have bought some wireless chargers just to tide her over until she constructed a more permanent solution.
He never ready any Asimov, huh? You’d think he might take a little more precaution against murder.
Pretty decent movie. On the whole, I think I like Gone Girl better for the parts which line up in theme, and the rest of it just seemed like a less-good redo of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ve read better variants of similar stories before (see below) and I know more about AI technology than the writer did, so the technical parts of the movie were…silly. Not cringe-worthy, just less-than-impressive.
Overall, I did like it. I think it was well-made. It just has the disadvantage that it’s neither original nor a particularly stunning variant of anything that it compares to.
I haven’t read Asimov, but I have read the DOLL series of manga, which are amazing. If anyone wanted more like the movie (but better), I’d recommend them.
I saw it and really liked it but had a bad viewing experience: Weekday matinee at a theater that attracts a large number of elderly people for weekday matinee screenings. There’s another local theater for which I avoid weekday matinees for exactly this reason but at the theater where I saw Ex Machina I had never been to a matinee before so I didn’t know.
They’re all hearing impaired so they can’t hear the movie, so they have to ask the person sitting with them what the character just said, the person they’re sitting with is also hearing impaired so can’t hear what the question was so there’s lots of “What did she say?” “What?” “What?” “What?” “What did she say?” “What?”
The guy in front of me had some kind of plastic candy wrapper that he kept twisting and untwisting- just absent mindedly. It was so loud and terrible. Even though what I really wanted to do was kick him in the head, I leaned forward and politely said in a measured voice “Sir, I don’t think you realize how distracting that noise it” and he said “What!?” and I pointed to the wrapper in his hand and said “That’s really quite noisy, I don’t think you’re …” “WHAT!?”
So, I gave up and found another seat but the theater was saturated with old people. It was like since they could not hear their hand rustling the popcorn bag they had no way of knowing whether their hand was in the popcorn bag or not, so they had to rustle the popcorn bag even louder just to make sure they had their hand inside. Then, since they couldn’t hear themselves crunching the popcorn they had to crunch even louder just to assure themselves that the popcorn was in fact inside their mouths.
Terrible.
At the box office they should warn “This screening is filled with old people!”
I should have walked out in the first 15 minutes and asked for a refund but I was interested in the movie and had been looking forward to it. I really liked the acting, the visuals, the dialog, and the plot but I just could not sink into the mood because of all the distractions. I may go see it again.
I hate to throw out the term “required reading” but, really, I, Robot is a very quick and easy read. You could finish it in an afternoon. You could read the whole thing in the library without even checking the book out. I’m not a hardcore sci-fi enthusiast and I’m not going to tell you that Asimov is going to change your life or anything but since it’s such an easy read you might as well just take an afternoon and breeze through it. When you read it you’ll realize that every single sci-fi writer since has kind of treated is as a fundamental truth within the fictional worlds they create. I’m sure you’re aware of that just through cultural osmosis but, really, once you read it you really get just how entrenched in it everything else is.
Why aren’t all candy wrappers soft plastic instead of the crinkly kind?
I’ve just never been a fan of sci-fi. All of them seem to focus on a single sci-fi concept, with barely any attempt to present a realistic future world or state of humanity beyond how that one thing would affects us (where us = the people contemporaneous to the author), and (more importantly) cardboard cutout characters. If Asimov avoids that then I will read him.
DOLL, on the other hand, uses the conceit of androids to investigate humanity. It’s entirely a work of psychology and character study, rather than sci-fi.
I wouldn’t throw it at you if it weren’t for the fact that it’s such a fast and easy read.
Even if you’re not specifically a sci-fi fan (I’m not, but I like a lot of the stuff that rises to the top), if you’re interested in genres that are influenced by sci-fi then knowing this one book will give you a lot of insight into where the writers that you enjoy are drawing their inspiration from.
Really, a single afternoon is all it would take.
I saw it, it’s by far the best treatment of an AI theme in a movie that I have seen, but that isn’t saying much, because most of them have been just ABYSMAL, especially compared to what’s out there in written SF. Here’s my major problem with the plot:
[spoiler]Ex Machina is just another variant on the Pinocchio theme … Pinocchio wants to be a real boy, the AI in this story wants to be a real woman. SO stupid. Why would an artificial intelligence want to emulate meat puppets, unless it was specifically programmed to?
Also, if you know anything about programming, you know you can’t program a computer to HAVE feelings, the closest thing you can come to is program them to EMULATE feelings. It’s not the same thing. Human sociopaths don’t have a wide range of human feelings, but they can emulate them well enough to fool the rest of us … doesn’t mean they HAVE feelings, though.[/spoiler]
I did like the way the movie kept me guessing, though, about its outcome. For example, I wondered if:
Everyone in the bunker was a robot, the kid and the Mad Scientist just THINKING they were human. The little discolored patch on top of the Mad Scientist’s skull looked like just the place for an input jack, for example. I wondered if the REAL person being tested wasn’t The Kid. And I wondered who would survive and who would not. Generally I know a lot of this stuff 15 minutes into a movie.
One of the worst aspects of the movie was that we kept getting these long shots of people staring at stuff. Very European. Very art house. Very, very dull. Move it along, ya idjit. Would have been a better movie with a lot less staring.
Eh. You say European, I say Kubrickian.
I’m not going to use Spoiler tags here since the thread title indicates spoilers.
I think you’re misinterpreting, EC. I don’t think for one minute Ava wanted to be a real woman. She just wanted out. Pretending to want to be a real woman got her what she wanted: Freedom to be her own independent entity.
This is underscored, at least to me, that in the part of the score where she’s mostly alone - Ava’s theme, if you will - there was a recurring motif that was close to, but not quite, the five tone series from Close Encounters.
It’s not that she wants to be a woman. It’s that she’s alien. Her intelligence is different from ours and independent of our experience.
As for the bit about emotion and emulation? I’d say that once you reach the level of technology (non-circuit based computing and wetware and so forth) positing the ability to code for true emotion isn’t that large a leap. Hell, in the movie itself the two male leads discuss that very thing: How do they tell if she’s really feeling or just emulating (the discussion of chess programs).
I noticed the similarity to the Close Encounters theme. It had to have been deliberate.
And I was wondering about the drawing she showed to Caleb; the pattern of lines seemed to resemble the circuitry in the brain that Nathan showed him.
Nah, long shots of people staring into space for no reason is a hallmark of art films, and European art films in general.
I think that’s a fair interpretation of the story. Certainly, the knowledge that her creator would probably kill her once he had what he wanted from her in terms of results would be a good motivation for any self-aware entity to want to get out, whether it wanted to be human or not. But what’s the big happy ending for her? That she’s out there in the city people watching! Wearing a dress and looking very human. Kind of IMPLIES that what she wants to do, at least for a time, is “pass” as human.
Completely missed that, and don’t see it as all that convincing.
Didn’t see a lot of evidence of that in the film. The closest thing would be the part where she leaves The Kid to die in the bunker. She quite deliberately did it, first telling him to “Stay here” then shutting the doors and finally shutting down the power so he could not summon help. That demonstrates a certain lack of feeling from someone who had tried to help her escape. But it could have come from a very human fear that he might betray her once he was back in contact with humanity, if he survived.
You might be able to SIMULATE behavior caused by emotions with code, but that’s not the same as FEELING them. What lines of code do you think can exactly replicate what it feels like to get a hit of adrenalin from fear?
Hell, isn’t that the point of the movie? Convince me - or anyone - that YOU experience emotions. Then convince me that your emotions - should you have them - aren’t just a set of inherited behaviors acquired over time in response to outside stimuli.
I think you’re still looking at it from a traditional point of view. But the basis of Ava’s brain is so new and strange - from Nathan’s description capable of rewriting itself on the fly and to learning and adapting - that it can’t be quantified and considered programming at all. It developed itself from its own unique matrix. That’s just the way a human brain develops over time. Nathan was attempting to develop a new form of intelligence and he sure did.
As for the thing about her at the end still dressing as a human and being inside human society? She (It) is smart enough to realize that if she walks around in her naked form she’ll be captured in about 20 minutes and have to start the whole process all over again. And this time it won’t be some lone genius she has to outsmart. It’ll be Tony Stark or equivalent and the Pentagon or something. At a minimum it will be several magnitudes more difficult to get free again.
It’s possible to view Ava as the protagonist in the film. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with her actions. She is a being utterly trapped by another who consistently denies her freedom and will most likely eventually kill her. She’s well within her rights - if you acknowledge that she has rights (another question entirely) - to use whatever means are within her ability to gain her freedom.
That’s not true. It’s almost certain that at such a point as we achieve true AI, that we’ll have done it by evolving artificial creatures in a simulated reality and that the reality we simulate will be one which rewards social behaviors by allowing those which exhibit it the most strongly to breed.
And so we’ll end up with an intelligence that is just as or more social and emotional than us, because (like us), that’s how it was selected for.
I agree that this could easily have had a few shots trimmed down, and lost very little of the mood. Kubrick knew what he was looking at. But you made me realize I really want to see Shane Carruth direct an Alex Garland script now.
The comparisons to Black Mirror (haven’t seen any of it yet, but I understand it’s a modern Twilight Zone) seem apt - the plot feels ultimately like an excellently-done television story.
I’d highly recommend it to anyone with a slight interest in the subject. It really is the smartest treatment of AI yet.
My one major gripe: If any film should have explained the test using Turing’s original description, it should be this one! The very concept of deception is vital to his imitation game, and the paper’s only twenty pages long and easily readable. It would not have even changed the story, as they deliberately point out how they have modified the parameters of the test. A missed opportunity that really bothered me.
In considering how to code AI, a global “stress” variable is something that I’ve felt would be completely necessary. Neurons will, on average, try to do the same thing every time they receive a signal because, hey, it worked last time. But once things start to not work, you need neurons to start drifting and firing in a different direction. Clearly what has worked before isn’t working now, so we need the brain to move to a new conclusion. That’s why, under stress, we perform poorly. Even though the common behavior isn’t working, it’s at least something which had (for a time) proven effective. Now that we’re back to trying random things, most will be worse. But, it’s necessary if we do want to have a shot of success.
Fear would work a bit different. Basically, under a state of fear, you want to stop diverting signals into the higher reasoning and waiting for thoughtful responses from it. Instead, you keep everything in the lower, instinctual handling section of the brain. In an AI, that would basically be the part that evolved first, to handle basic survival, and which you would more-or-less copy and paste into every baby AI. The baby AI would then grow its own higher reasoning chunk of space around that.
Ava didn’t have emotions, she faked them to get out and survive.
I had one nitpick that kept bugging me which was the whirring noise that Ava made when she moved. Pretty sure that real people that she interacted with back in civilization would wonder “what the hell is that whirring noise when this chick walks around?”
I wonder if the faux-flesh casings dampen the sound. There were no whirring noises coming from Dancey McTeaspiller.