Alex Garland (2015)

Alex Garland wrote a good screenplay for the film version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel about human cloning.  In Ex Machina, his debut as writer-director, Garland engages with artificial intelligence.  Caleb is a computer-coder for a Silicon Valley company that has developed Bluebook, an online search engine that enjoys a 94% share of the global market.  He’s chosen from among all the company’s staff to spend a week at the home of Nathan, its reclusive CEO.   Caleb is dropped by helicopter in the middle of Nathan’s vast estate, the pilot explaining that this is as close to the boss’s actual residence as he’s allowed to come.  Caleb has to make the rest of his way there on foot, through woodland.  (The location of the spectacular mountainous landscape above the house and woods is unspecified in the film but is actually Norway.)  Nathan explains to Caleb that his assignment during his week-long stay will be to participate in an experiment to discover whether a machine developed by Nathan is able to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human – the so-called ‘Turing test’.  Caleb will interact with what Nathan claims is the world’s first true AI, built in the body of a robot girl, known as Ava.  Caleb has a key card which opens some but not all doors in the place.  Before his interactions with Ava begin, Nathan gets his guest to sign ‘the mother of all non-disclosure agreements’.

Nathan loses no time either in telling Caleb that his home ‘is not a house but a research centre’.  The clinical atmosphere and sci-fi-ish design of the place are eerie enough but, like horror-movie residences of earlier eras, its recognisably domestic aspects also help to make it unnerving.  What Caleb eventually finds inside the wardrobe units in Nathan’s bedroom is more startling than it would be if discovered in a laboratory.  Ava, whose fleshly face, hands and feet are interspersed by obviously cyborg sections, is beautiful both in her humanoid bits and as android construction.  The film’s sets and special effects amount to an impressive piece of design.  Ex Machina is clever and interesting but the process of making it look good has caused Alex Garland to treat his story rather too respectfully.  It should have been possible to give AI the serious consideration it merits without losing a sense of humour, which the film mostly lacks.  And although the subject seems up-to-the-minute, the storyline depends on familiar dramatic apparatus – hubristic scientific creation, a human falling in love with a non-human, and so on.

The beginning of Ex Machina is admirably brisk.  Caleb finds out that he’s the chosen one and reaches Nathan’s base in less than five minutes of screen time.  As the film goes on, though, Alex Garland’s brevity gets to seem like evasion.  At one point, Nathan lies to Caleb that he was selected because he’s the company’s best coder.  Caleb is naturally ready to accept this flattering explanation but I was never clear what he thought he was in for at the outset:  is he expecting to be involved in IT development or just to meet the mysterious CEO?  Caleb is AI-literate enough to be self-confident in early conversations with Nathan, even daring to dispute one of two things that the boss says, but the plot comes to depend on Caleb’s switching between naïveté and resourcefulness, according to Garland’s needs.  The film ends with Nathan killed by the work of his own hand, Caleb locked in the facility and Ava taking his place on the helicopter return flight to the outside world.  In one of their sessions together, Ava conducts a lie-detector test on Caleb.  Her questions include, ‘Are you a good person?’, and his answer, ‘I think so’, doesn’t register as an untruth.  And, though his intelligence is erratic, Caleb isn’t a fool.   All in all, he doesn’t deserve his eventual fate:  you feel at the end that Alex Garland has eclipsed Nathan in the heartless inventor stakes.  If Garland means for Ava’s final integration into human society to be alarming, he doesn’t really succeed.  This is partly because Ava’s lovely, sad expression and gentleness have made her naturally appealing but also because it’s hard to accept that Nathan’s disappearance and Caleb’s failure to reappear from his week’s leave will go unnoticed for long – or that the police will be as constrained as the helicopter pilot was from venturing too close to Nathan’s home to investigate.

Ex Machina would be a better film if Alex Garland’s direction had more of the qualities of Oscar Isaac’s playing of Nathan.  The disappointment I felt about Isaac’s performance in A Most Violent Year, which I saw three days previously, was erased by what he does in Ex Machina.  He’s not constrained by seriousness here.  His Nathan is a vividly entertaining, black-bearded baddie – an exuberantly nasty fellow in his human interactions with Caleb as well as an evil IT genius.  Nathan lurches between bouts of heavy drinking and intense physical exercise by way of morning-after compensation.  It’s not convincing that he’s so inclined to make himself vulnerable by getting regularly hammered (and this is crucial for taking the plot forward) but Isaac’s physical dynamism is, in all Nathan’s moods, so exciting to watch that it’s hard to mind.  He has a great bit dancing with Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), the mostly silent Japanese girl who lives in.  Isaac is vocally no less dexterous:  he’s brilliant at conveying how irritating Nathan finds Caleb – there’s a sarcastic edge to his voice even when’s he’s back-slapping and addressing the young man as ‘dude’.  In the company of others whose humanity is variously dubious (Kyoko’s appearance turns out to be predictably deceptive), Domhnall Gleeson is very effective in making Caleb unequivocally human and sympathetic.  Alicia Vikander is Ava:  it seems rather too soon after Jonathan Glazer’s film for more under-the-skin-of-the-female-body revelations but Vikander’s face and slender form are so perfect that the moment when Ava puts on her full human exterior is oddly touching.

29 January 2015