Diabolicus Ex Machina...tion!

Rating: 9/10 (22 December 2017)

Written and directed by Alex Garland, "Ex Machina" proves once again that the science fiction genre is naturally prone to raise disturbing and thought-provoking questions about our mortality and how human intelligence can be the only possible key to triumph over it.
If you look at movies like "2001", "Frankenstein", "Terminator 2" or "Blade Runner", you'll find as a common denominator a humanity trying to survive or challenge itself by playing God, and creating a very advanced technological device or an artificial intelligence that will inevitably backfire, that's the narrative of most sci-fi classics, it's always about technological hubris.
There's a scene when discovering that his employer has created an advanced form of artificial intelligence (AI), young trainee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) says "it's not the history of men, but the history of Gods". You can see his eyes shining with sparkles of admiration in front of the "idol". His name is Nathan, his face like a mug shot from of an ISIS suspect but Oscar Isaac delivers one of the finest and most credible performances of recent years as a self-centered genius so intelligent he's actually blasé about it.
Nathan lives in an estate so big it takes two hours to fly over it and a house confined in some unknown geographical area where he spends his time as if he was some big campus animal party but listen to him talking and you'll know he means business. He reinvents the role of the 'mad scientist', no nerdy looks, no manic mimics, no scientific jargon, he's actually the one who asks Caleb to stop talking as if he was in a seminar. The dynamics between Nathan and Caleb might be the best thing about the film, which is saying a lot.
Caleb is the chosen one, an engineer in Nathan's Blue Book company, a sort of combo of Facebook and Google that earned a big fortune through search engines, officiously using the same fraudulent methods than the competitors, which made it immune to any suing. Nathan hired Caleb for a week to proceed to a Turing Test with his late creation: Ava, a female robot whose artificial intelligence was made from billions of data gathered from cell phones and social networks.
Ava is played by Alicia Vikander and I will comment her performance by saying it's perhaps the closest full-skin version of Hal 9000. Caleb points out that knowing she's a robot might create a bias because in the test, you're not supposed to know. Nathan explains that if he didn't interact with her in face-to-face sessions, he would have the illusion of being with a human and the point is to spot hints of consciousness despite the certitude that she's an AI. That's exactly how Vikander's performance plays on an Oscar-winning level.
And the film works on three levels as well: first, it's a wonderful screenplay and you just enjoy the exchanges between Nathan and Caleb and the statements they speak about human various form of interactions and what spoken or body language can reveal about our intelligence and humanity. There's a wonderful dialogue about sex and how it's deeply connected with gender-awareness and whether it's true or not is besides the point, it makes you process personal thoughts while following the plot.
The second level is in the way these lines are delivered and what they say about the speakers, one is too cocky and arrogant, one is shy and insecure and this is pivotal for the test, it's human factor, and how it can affect one's notion about AI. The third element is that the plot is so smart, you're trying to outsmart it, to anticipate its moves like in a chess game. Nathan has all the makings of a villain, and Ava creating short cuts to avoid his surveillance to tell Caleb that he shouldn't trust Nathan were predictable moves.
But we're all smart enough to think it was too convenient that Nathan wouldn't do nothing about these inconveniences. And while I was busy trying to anticipate who from Nathan and Caleb would outsmart the other, I also enjoyed the interactions with Ava. She's obviously 'infatuated" with Caleb but when you look at Nathan's behavior and discover the extent of his egomania, there's no way to anticipate that Ava is the real one to fear. But at the end, you realize that everything made sense, the film is conceived in order to make you try to outsmart Nathan until we're all being outsmarted by Ava.
And it's fascinating because it's that precise level of intelligence that betrays her, her cruelty toward her own savior. It all comes down to Ava being either a robot or a psychopath. But it took me a second viewing to appreciate the ending a little more. At first, I thought it was a cheap attempt for spectacular gore betraying a serious lack of inspiration, but finally, it's the perfect twist because it shows the limits of the artificial intelligence; it can lead to manipulation and vileness, a vileness even scarier because not meant as evil, but as an automatic defensive move.
The point of the Turing test was to spot an action that wouldn't be deemed as automatic and in fact, it's the real flaw of the reasoning from both Nathan and Caleb. If the goal is to find an action that doesn't have a specific reason to be, an automatism, how about a non automatic action whose goal is to make humans believe it's not automatic, once you can think of simulation, the case was hopeless. An AI can pretend to be human if it meant its survival, conservation instinct can be a better driver than love. There are Pollocks and there are hacks. Anyone can be manipulated.
I think the script is so intelligently manipulative, so multi-layered and so smart Garland himself would be outsmarted by it, like his own AI.