My first question to Nathan after meeting Ava would have been why was she locked up? Oh, you haven’t programmed the 3 laws of robotics into her? Why the f*** not?! What protocols are in place if she managed to break free or connect to the internet? A proximity fuse to shut her off if she leaves the building? A key word to disable her? Does she have a fragile body easily disabled by a 6 year old? All sorts of things anyone who is supposedly as smart as these two should ask and answer.
My take on this movie is it is nothing more than a dressed up teen horror flick. Instead of the stupid person going into the dark basement, we have supposedly intelligent people doing similar by playing with AI as if they have never read a single science fiction book on AI. So, smart people doing really stupid things. Very distracting when people don’t act like they should given their backgrounds.
I get the sense that Nathan had a lot of hubris. This leads to plenty of mistakes. He didn’t want a shackled AI, he wanted to make a brain that was in all respects exactly the same as a person. Even though he takes the failures and makes them into bedroom toys, that doesn’t seem to be what he really wanted. He wanted to own a person, a real and full person. And a real person doesn’t have a kill switch, or any laws of robotics. He goes over how their brains are created and it’s like applying chaos theory to the internet inside a petri dish - he doesn’t control how it grows exactly or what the final result is, he just changes the initial variables hoping that when they spiral upward and outward they create the matrix he wants. And he’s had plenty of time to see that none of them can physically escape their cage. (Seriously though Nathan why would you not replace the cracked wall and make it an inch thicker while you were at it)
If I were Caleb though my first reaction really would have been “did you program her with the first law or what?” because he’s not a megalomaniac willing to dismiss the rules. So I can see how people would be upset with Caleb not going to the obvious question. Still though, despite that, I’d want to see the AI anyway in his shoes…just to see. Take a peek. Curiosity. And then, once you’re that far into the rabbit hole, blinded under a spotlight as bright as Nathan’s intellect, charmed by a robot willing to do anything in order to leave…well…
Anyway, I was willing to let that go for the sake of the story. We can imagine this being a world where Asimov never thought up the rules.
The Laws of Robotics aren’t hardwired into the universe. You don’t have to make your robot follow them. I’d even speculate that a robot created without them won’t go on an immediate killing spree for the same reasons humans, who are not created with such a built in restriction, do not routinely go on killing sprees.
But I would have a fail-safe, in case they do go on a killing spree, like some humans do.
You know, you have a point. Books on AI have done a much better job of dealing with AI issues going all the way back to Neuromancer. Hell, going all the way back to I, Robot. We may have overestimated “Ex Machina” because it hasn’t been as brain dead as other movies dealing with AI (either computer or enhanced humans). For example, I had high hopes for “Transcendence” and “Lucy” and they were both brain dead garbage, not even worth discussing seriously.
Honestly, one of the best treatments of AI outside books was the X-Files episode "Kill Switch"which was written by William Gibson. A pity that moviemakers do not appear to understand the importance of good writing.
I’m pretty sure they do. I’d say the amount of well written movies to poorly written movies is about the same ratio as well written books to poorly written books. Actually, there may be more poorly written books, considering that it’s quite easy to self-publish these days. And as we all know, #1 hit books are not necessarily well written at all, same for movies.
Just because a different writer may have handled the theme to your greater satisfaction does not mean that this particular writer didn’t try their best or thought, “hey, let’s just halfass it, whatever!” I’m sure they aimed to write something good, and whether they fell short of the mark is another matter.
Personally I’m all for soft sci-fi over hard, and am perfectly willing to let quite a bit pass by so I can focus on what makes all the characters in this movie tick, which is the part that interests me.
I wasn’t being literal with the characterization. It’s clear she presented as a femme fatale but that doesn’t mean her essence is truly female or, more specifically, that she’s an archetypical woman. If we posit that her nature reflects Her creator’s fears and biases, it makes perfect sense that she would “transform” into a femme fatale image immediately after betraying him. Becuase femininity in its most threatening and powerful form looks like that to men like Nathan.
I can see how my earlier post could be seen as rude and I apologize. My tone tends to get like that when I’m posting in a hurry, in the midst of other distractions.
I’ve enjoyed your contributions to this thread and appreciate that you see many of the same themes like I do. As I said previously, I can relate to your beef about the negative symbolism towards women because it left a taste in my mouth too.
The movie, like most, is told from a male POV. Even in its critical analysis of male assumptions towards women, the audience sees things as Caleb sees them. What would be nice is if we could start seeing more movies like this through the eyes of female leads.
As I understood it, the intelligence of the robots was evolved, not programmed from the top down. With artificially evolved intelligence, would it even be possible to insert the three laws into the robot’s psyche? Sounded to me like Nathan was trying to evolve them to possess empathy, and if they possessed empathy toward humans, then that would solve the problem of robot morality. He was keeping them under lock and key until he was sure they could play well with others.
Of course, a kill switch would still have been a good idea, but Nathan’s sin was pride.
I know you’re being flip, but in a story with female archetypes, the characters and their setup would need to be different. So we can’t just change Caleb into a woman and pretend it translates the same way.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think an audience would buy that a Caleb-like woman would be spurned into going into head-over-heels savior mode. A helpless, trapped, meek male AI doesn’t fit in with common romantic tropes. In an alternate movie, the male AI would probably need to present as strong to convincingly get an archetypical female lead to fall in love with him. Which is a completely different movie from Ex Machina.
It directly addresses my previous question about the skin scene, too. I didn’t think the recontextualization of her deeper nature quite worked at the end largely because of the highly gendered nature of the skin scene. “Not a woman” seems very strange. She’s not just indifferently pulling on a handy disguise to fool the meatbags. That scene is overwhelmingly from her perspective, not Caleb’s, and there is deep personal satisfaction in the entire process. She is thoroughly engaged in the moment of Becoming. But you have a very different view on that which I hadn’t previously considered.
I don’t really have any more to say now, though. I’m just going to have to chew on your ideas here for a while. You’ve given me a lot to think about. Thank you for that.
I saw a review today which pointed out that this movie is basically a re-telling of The Island of Dr. Moreau. That had not occurred to me, but it’s sort of true.
This felt like every AI, artificial person (Frankenstein, Pinocchio), and slave overthrowing the masters story I’ve ever seen in my life. It was entirely predictable. What’s the draw that creates the buzz? It’s competently shot and acted, and there’s some neat visuals (the robot smashing her arms) but it doesn’t bring much of anything new or interesting to the table does it? It felt a lot like a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episode padded out to two hours, except with more bush shots.
I would have liked to see Caleb confront Nathan about keeping a stable of sex bots when he’s a billionaire who could get any woman he wanted. Isn’t that pretty damned pathetic? I know we’re supposed to take it for granted that Nathan is a degenerate control freak, but I would have liked to see him defend himself.
A lot of digital ink spilled over Ava leaving Caleb. To me the question isn’t why she left him, but why would she take him along? She doesn’t love him. He’s a liability. Taking him is nothing but downsides and a threat to her existence. Plus she knew Caleb was a creeper who had the hots for her. She hasn’t had good experiences with creepy guys. She has no reason to trust people in general, especially someone who knows what she is. To me it seemed like the only reason she locked him away instead of just stabbing him is because the robot bodies are so fragile that a physical confrontation would be too risky. Seems like if they trip they’d shatter into a million pieces.
Caleb seemed bitter and jealous of Nathan – not only was he smarter, but he was a gregarious outgoing personality. I got the sense Caleb looked down on guys like that, as nerdy guys are wont to do. Nathan was probably the type of guy who stole his girl and kicked sand in his face in high school. It wrecked Caleb’s ego to see someone like that be so much more successful than him. So figuring out a way to ruin his robot plans was almost petty revenge, as much as it was being a knight in shining armor for Ava and getting robo-nookie.
A lot of people nitpicking details (muh three laws, how did he make AI and robot bodies by himself, where’s a kill switch, keycards, power surges, etc), but I chuckled that Ava’s face was a composite of Caleb’s porn searches. Yeah, that’s what guys search specifically to jerk it to. Hot juicy…faces.
I found it hard to hate Nathan too much. He was the most entertaining part of an otherwise dour movie. I especially liked when he dropped the “I know the quote, dude” line. Caleb really thought he was impressing with a quote everyone and their dog knows.
Writing really well is hard, very hard, insanely difficult in fact. Most movie writers, with a few exceptions, aren’t capable of it. So of course they come off as half-assed compared to a really good writer.
And male-Ava would be seen as worse than Hitler, at least for feminists/SJWs. Meanwhile, MRAs would be spamming “MGTOW!” all over the place and doing a happy dance.
It’s funny to think about gender flipped romance roles though. Imagine if at the end of Titanic it’s Rose who heroically sacrifices herself to save Jack. I don’t think that movie makes a billion dollars because teenage girls watch it 12 times a day. Maybe I’m wrong.
I disagree. You could do a straight up gender flip and it’d be fine. If you think it’s a problem you could just play up female-Caleb as being a lonely, inexperienced romantic even moreso than they did male Caleb, or that she adopts puppies or something sappy like that.
I wouldn’t portray male-Ava as a beefcake, more of a wispy waif. Boyishly cute.
Might have trouble creating sympathy of male-Ava being a sex bot who services a female billionaire. Oh no, the tragedy.
If the movie gender flipped all the female body worship it’d be way more niche. It’d be called homo-erotic.
Meanwhile, Caleb, who does have empathy, was willing to take some pretty serious risks to his own well-being to free Ava. (Think about it. What happens after Caleb and Ava walk out together? How do they even get back to civilization? Caleb was willing to take those risks to help a captive.)
A lot of good observations here, and I can’t really disagree with most. As a big Asimov (among others) reader when I was young I thought the story was predictable, but the way it was told and the CGI used brought it up to date.
The moment I really thought “OH, FOR FUCK’S SAKE!” was when Caleb first betrayed Nathan. It was then the writing was on the wall, he obviously was a small-minded, jealous little man and wanted everything Nathan had built up - and in the end he got it, which was poetic justice in a way. I did feel sorry for them both at the end, who with some humanity wouldn’t, and the security features (who thought up such a strong security system with so brittle a link - a piece of plastic card - and no other way to get out of the rooms?) being used against Ava’s jailers was also kind of poetic.
A good story, well told and with great special effects. I gave it 8/10 on IMDB and have noticed the numerous threads there discussing the meanings within the film; which goes to show how well it was directed, IMO.
I just rented the movie last night and was very impressed.
On the “Hitler’s mustache”* shift in themes: I agree that it doesn’t quite hold up to rational analysis after the fact, but it worked (for me at least) in the moment. Other posters have been arguing about the very different themes and tropes that were invoked at different parts of the movie. In the moment, however, that contributed to the eerie, unsettling atmosphere. What’s going to happen next? I don’t know because my brain can’t latch on to a single trope that lets me know how it’s going to end. It really reinforces how alien Ava’s intelligence is.
After reading and digesting some of the discussion in this thread, I tend to agree with you with the face that the gendered themes are mostly a reflection of Nathan’s misogyny.
I was impressed by the physical design of Ava’s character. Up close, we see a face that is recognizably human, and parts of her body that are recognizably machine. But in distant shots, particularly from the surveillance videos, depending on the lighting and angle Ava’s silhouette shifts from Normal Human Figure to Something Very Alien. I also remember a few points where Ava’s laughter blends in and out of the noises her servos make. Both of these are forcing my brain to reconcile contrasting stimuli, one deeply instinctual and connected straight to all of the circuits involving emotion and social interactions, and the other unfamiliar and artificial. The effect is deeply unsettling.
*nice metaphor by the way, though it took my uncaffeinated brain a few minutes to remember that screensavers had a real purpose once upon a time…
While I agree with you about the movie, your thoughts on where we are at with A.I. are not even close to what is happening in reality.
Faster/more hardware isn’t the answer to A.I. It is handy for things like Deep Blue, which isn’t really A.I. in the sense of the movie.
A.I., as in the movie, means a self-directed entity. For example, while Deep Blue can beat people at chess, Deep Blue can’t decide that Chess is now solved for itself and it is time to move on to Go.
And then there is Watson, which is the Jeopardy computer. Watson is impressive. However Watson also lacks self-direction. Watson might be awesome at compiling information and sorting and coming to an answer based on an input it was given, but Watson lacks the curiosity to find those things for itself.
Intelligence is a tricky thing to define. Is it abstract thought? Logic? Self-awareness? Creativity? Problem solving? All the above?
In the movie Ava appears to be self-aware and creative. It also appears she has desires and the will to make choices which will get her those desires (ya know, murder and all, though it could be considered self-defense). Watson and Deep Blue are no where close to that. No one is anywhere close to that. And I doubt anyone will be any closer in the next 50 years.
However, I expect a Go computer to get to a very high level of play.