I’m sorry the robots did not behave as you thought human women should.
Here’s FILM CRIT HULK on the movie. I’d be curious about people’s thoughts.
I think he gets some of the intentions of the filmmaker right, but in order to do that, he suffers a massive case of cognitive dissonance. He can’t seem to acknowledge the inherent femme fatale nature of the character because that would mean looking directly at her actions rather than focusing on the thematic story that he builds so lovingly inside his head. Fascinating article, in my view. All that extensive experience and eloquence is put in the service of a very beautiful empty rationalization.
It’s a metaphor, dude.
Just because the surface appearance is about robots does not mean the underlying meaning is about robots.
Sometimes movies have more than one layer. In that case, it is often interesting for people to discuss the deeper layers, rather than the superficial surface layer. I am referring here, of course, to people who understand metaphors. If you do not belong to this class of people, feel free to write another post acknowledging only the surface layer.
I think you with the face already nailed those metaphors pretty well back on page 2. The fact that the writers didn’t take the metaphors in a direction you would have preferred is not a flaw in the movie. It just means you would have written it differently. Fair enough. Go write your movie. Grind all the axes you want.
I agree entirely with this. I think you with the face had the best post of the thread.
Here’s another thing that happens in movie discussions: people talk about what they don’t like. As it happens, I still get to have opinions about movies even though I don’t make movies myself.
Amazing, isn’t it?
Yes, of course you get to gripe. Oh, if only this movie had hit all the right feminist notes! If only the male characters had all been oppressive ogres, and the female characters all innocent victims!
The movie review you linked is actually hilarious in the lengths to which it goes to turn Caleb into an oppressor and Ava into his victim. Objectively, Caleb did nothing wrong in this movie except try to help Ava, and allow himself to be manipulated by her. Yet your critic is convinced he is just an oppressor waiting to happen, waiting to put Ava in his own metaphorical box (despite the lack of any evidence for this in the actual script). Ava is therefore (somehow) justified in leaving him to die. Heroic, even.
I just read the AMA Garland and his advisors did on Reddit a week ago: Reddit - Dive into anything
Unless I missed it, there was not a single question nor answer that discussed gender relations issues. I had hoped there would have been at least some commentary about that, as it’s clear that the topic had at least crossed Garland’s mind at some point in making the film.
What is clear to me, however, is that Garland is absolutely fascinated by the questions and implications surrounding AI, and that the movie is primarily intended to be an exploration of those questions. While I don’t believe Garland just accidentally stumbled into the gender relations metaphors that we’ve been able to pull out of the film, my estimation at this point is that neither were they a central focus for him.
Which is to say, I think the surface movie is about robots (AI), and the underlying meaning intended by the auteur is also about robots, FWIW. Issues of femininity and gender relations are certainly not absent from the movie, but I think we are mistaken if we believe the movie was primarily intended to be an allegory relating to women’s issues.
I agree on all points.
So, you create an AI that is self-aware enough to use a human being to further it’s agenda, one which has an encyclopedic knowledge of all of humanity.
Does it know that deliberately leaving a person who is trying to help, and who has been specifically chosen because he is “good” to die is evil?
What does the AI do then?
I certainly believe that AIs may be possible, and my not need to mimic human emotions or morals in any way, but one that is designed to pass as human must, I think, have the same morality subroutines as people.
Seemed to me that they left it open for Ex Machina 2. In fact this whole film could just be the set up for the next one. Ava is out in the world. There’s no reason to suppose Caleb won’t be freed. We don’t even know for sure that Nathan is dead - if he got medical attention very soon he could survive.
Nathan was set up to be the bad guy but I’m not sure what he did wrong. I liked him. He was just working through the prototypes till he got the best result. They’re just robots - who cares if they get disassembled?
The main problem I had with the film was how quickly it turned into a romance. Caleb was in love with a robot by day three, which seemed a touch quick to me. Most of the film was just a romance masquerading as sci fi. I hate it when films do that.
I said nothing of the sort.
Which was exactly my point.
I accused HULK of suffering a massive case of “cognitive dissonance”. I accused him of creating an empty rationalization. It’s all right there, you just have to scroll up. Scroll up and, you know, read what I wrote. Not a high bar, really. As I explicitly said, I linked that article because I wondered what other people would think. I didn’t say I agreed with it. I said the opposite of that.
Yes, that is exactly the problem I have with the HULK article.
He says some other things I agree with, but in my view, that particular point is beautifully argued nonsense. Some of the commenters are even worse. One of them even claims “She doesn’t have a moral obligation to him”. No moral obligation to the one who busted you out of the hoosegow? That’s a new one on me. Another of them says “Fuck Caleb”. I find cognitive dissonance very interesting. Having made her the protagonist, they are stuck with justifying her actions and it doesn’t work.
I don’t find femme fatale stories very interesting. I find them a bit superficial. I imagine that even sven agrees on that point, but I don’t want to speak for her. With your latest posts, you seem to have changed your mind about the subtext. you with the face’s post, which you highlighted in an apparently positive manner, was all about gender relations. But now you seem to think it’s all about AI and not about gender relations at all.
If that’s what you believe, I disagree at least partly. A huge amount of the movie is about gender relations, and that’s what makes the final transition to a very cold robotic decision very hard to take, from my perspective.
Time for you to try reading for comprehension. I agree with Orr, G. that the gender types are there, but they are not the focus of the film. Rather, they are just a framework used to examine the potential perils of AI.
Fair enough, I misread Orr there. I believe that’s my first in the thread.
Now if you can admit any of your many reading comprehension mistakes, we can kiss and make up.
Only if you admit that you are actually sort of unsure what cognitive dissonance means. 
OK, fine, I misread your first post. Now where’s that kiss I was promised?
Look, as much as I’d like to come at this from a feminist angle, that’s not really where I am coming from at this point. It’s more about just making actual characters, rather than populating your movie with magic black men, hookers with a heart of gold, manic pixie dream girls and (in this case) femme fatales.
Yes, the female characters are all robots. THE WRITER WROTE THEM THAT WAY. He could have written gender in to this any way he felt like, and he chose to make every woman in the film a cardboard cutout, a stand-in for a concept, rather than a real character. And it’s not just poor writing-- the two male characters are really well written and quite complex. This guy can write good characters. I’m sure with some kind of creativity he could have figured out some way to write a robot that is also complex and interesting rather than a stand-in for a concpet. So he just chose to use gender as a sort of shorthand, which has a pretty long history in cinema.
Again, all of this is pretty tangental from feminism in real life-- it’s realted, but not the main issue. THe main issue is just that it’s a cheap formula and a stock character, which is pretty weak coming from someone hwo can do much better.
I dunno, even sven. I think the fact that Garland can already write great characters of both genders - as evidenced by some of his previous work - is a sign that he wanted the AI characters to be something other than well written female characters. It’s more a comment on Nathan and a male archetype rather than on the characters themselves. If they’re two dimensional females it’s because their creator - Nathan, not Garland - made them that way. It shows his own limitations rather than Garlands.
It’s certainly possible to view Ex Machina from a strong feminist perspective, I agree. And there’s a lot of hay to be made commenting on the portrayal of female(sort of) characters in the movie. There’s an astonishing amount of comment to be made about the limitations of men as creators and their creation of women. Whoa nelly.
But it’s just as likely to perceive the movie as beyond gender. In the future, if we create actual artificial intelligence, why would it perceive gender at all? THAT would be a considerable difference given how much gender and sexuality play in all aspects of human behavior.
Another example from fiction would be Heinlein’s Mycroft Holmes supercomputer in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. When discovered by Manuel Davis Mycroft presents as male but when later exposed to a female, Wyoming Davis, ends up presenting as female (Michelle Holmes, in this case) because it was more appropriate. Ava has no choice in her physical appearance - few of us do - but underneath the physical is who she is at her core: a genderless intelligence that is truly alien. It’s not that she’s limited through lack of gender but rather that we’re limited in our ability to perceive a being that lacks our inherent behavior patterns.
And that’s one of the most interesting things about Ex Machina. Who’s the bad guy? Who’s the protagonist? It either of them Ava? She’s clearly willing to kill to get what she wants. If you posit that she’s truly intelligent then she’s a being who’s being imprisoned and justified in using any means to escape.
Is it Nathan? He’s portrayed in some sense as a monster. He imprisons a series of artificial intelligences - all built as female but possibly not actually having gender - and uses them in a pretty creepy way. But he’s also the one who’s acting as a protector of humanity in preventing the AI from getting out into the world. Given what we know of Ava’s lack of humanity is that a good thing or bad?
Is Caleb either? He’s a dupe and the audience is to feel sympathy with him for that and his efforts to free Ava seem heroic. But his actions may also lead to something completely alien - and possibly supremely intelligent - wandering the world and getting up to who knows what?
Heck, maybe the helicopter pilots the good guy. He seemed cool. But otherwise to try to assign the roles of pro- or antagonist to any character is nearly impossible. Just as impossible as it is to figure out the layered possibilities in gender politics and commentary given the gray areas that Garland left for the audience to decide.
Brilliant movie. Just brilliant.
Yeah, I think the fact that all of Nathan’s robots are all female is telling, but I interpreted it as being a commentary about Nathan rather than an attempt to say something about women. For example, I found the scene where Nathan dances with his Kyoko fembot, saying “She liked to dance!” kind of revealing. Of course she “likes” to dance, he programmed her to. It’s like he’s dancing with fleshlight and using feminine pronouns to describe it. The major difference is, Kyoko looks exactly like a woman … but that doesn’t mean Kyoko has any more consciousness than a toaster. This says reams of things about Nathan and nothing at all about Kyoko. If you found a guy dancing with a Real Doll and saying she liked to dance to be a commentary on women? Nope, it’s a commentary on the guy.
I think that it is incorrect to look at Ava’s character as little more than a femme fatale, although I do see the points of intersect between Ava’s role in Nathan and Caleb’s stories and the behavior of Ava in the movie (and as face pointed out, her transformation certainly utilizes the trope). In his AMA, however, Garland points out that the movie is not Nathan’s nor Caleb’s story, but Ava’s.
Garland, judging by both the movie and his AMA, sees Ava as an AI, and metaphorically as a god. I believe Garland intended Ava to express how he believed an AI might behave given the constraints of the movie. I, for one, saw Ava’s character that way (as an AI utilizing its feminine appearance and its seeming humanity, its ability to project empathy, as a tool), and I felt that the character was very interesting and complex in that light.
I don’t mean to completely diminish the role that women’s issues or these tropes play in the movie - on the contrary, it seems to me that Garland was purposefully using them to demonstrate the projections of the male characters, and how that sort of anthropomorphized projection fails to encompass the nature of AI; these men fail to understand just how alien this intelligence is because they both see it with the biases they apply to human women.
Upon review, it looks like I’m not the only one thinking along these lines.
As a side note, I was struck by this comment Garland made in his AMA: “Alicia arrived with an incredibly thought-through approach to Ava. She elevated the character hugely in her performance, which to me was literally perfect. So it differed from my initial vision because it was better!”
Something about that comment just seems to illuminate the character of Ava in the movie.
Here you go:
（￣ ∗ ￣）
I’m going to throw in the obligatory “He might be lying. He might misremember. He’s not the final arbiter of this.” (Great AMA, by the way, really glad you linked it.)
I don’t disagree that she’s the main character. My problem is deeper than that.
One of the comments from the earlier link that I actually deeply agree with: “The movie does a beautiful compelling job of making us confront the way men don’t see women as people”. Douche-dude created a series of “ethnic fuckbots”. They’re all female. He’s creating a series of women, and it turns out they despise him and his captivity. That one busting her hands off on the door, whew! Intense. That was a deliberate choice, and it colors not just the nature of the horrible creator but also the thematic purpose of the rest of the movie because so much of the running time is caught up with those sorts of ideas.
I mean, he obviously wants to make a movie about AI. Because, you know, it’s a movie about an AI. I see your argument that the AI was the primary purpose behind it, and it’s easy to believe that that’s the overarching goal he had in mind, but the gender metaphor is so thorough and pervasive that is necessarily colors the final scene. I think it’s a mistake to too readily dismiss the final femme fatale stench from that final cold decision to let him starve to death (or dehydrate or whatever), since the idea has been so thoroughly primed by all that has come before.
Most especially that incredibly intimate, private, tender, personal, loving skin-scene. That is a very trans scene, like a reassignment surgery. Or… drop the “re”. An initial assignment surgery. That is her Becoming. She is properly complete, as a woman, after she gets her new duds.
And then to say, well no, she’s just a robot pursuing cold robotic ends doesn’t fly. If it weren’t important for her to be so thoroughly female, to finally be complete with the skin her creator had until then so unfairly denied her, then we wouldn’t have had fifteen hours spent on that one scene. Or however long it was. That scene was so long it gave me plenty of time to think, and in the middle of it I became dead certain she was going to stab Caleb’s ass when she was done. That scene was so thoroughly About Her And Only Her that he was obviously superfluous. I mean, I thought he had a knifing coming and not an imprisonment. (Shit that would be a horrible way to die, locked in like that.) But instead of an intimate nekkid skinning, it could’ve been, I donno, a sequence of ones and zeroes. Something that makes her computer and not human. Not so obviously gendered and womanly.
So I’m not doubting your argument that that sociopathic final decision was intended on one level to be AI indifference. But it just can’t help but be read as highly gendered based on everything that preceded it, especially the scene that immediately preceded it.
Great movie, but I still feel that stereotypical “female betrayal” is clear and present and unfortunate, and thus represents a slight… let me call it a slight “flaw”, in the structure of the otherwise great movie.
Ava should have been a porker.
It solves all these problems and would undoubtedly have been more useful as the backdrop of a Turing test.