Lots of talk about AI, but film's intelligence feels artificial

Rating: 5/10 (10 May 2015)

There was a time when the future looked quite bright, indeed, and that was from behind the black shades of 'Sixties Ray Bans. Trips to the moon were actually taking place instead of being debunked on the internet. And in the sci-fi classic, "The Tenth Victim," Ursula Andress writhing in a miniskirt to the abstract jazz of Piero Piccioni promised even sex in the future would be better, too, at least much more interesting.
Then suddenly came along HAL9000 - the archly wheedling, we-hope- you-enjoy-your-trip steward of "2001: A Space Odyssey" - and dark- minded Stanley Kubrick prophesied that maybe trekking in all those gleaming spaceships might just prove as dull as a cross-country Greyhound excursion and that those data-spewing Univacs may not have in mind handing over the Meaning of Life, but delivering the final blow to ours.
Maybe that's when we should have started pulling the plugs...
But then a generation fell hopeless and inextricably in love with technology. There was social networking, YouTube, sexting, and funny pre-made memes to express their most profound thoughts for them - all without the tiresome honing of skills of self-expression. And that is why - despite the warnings of a few somewhat tech-savvy folk like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk - the near-presence of the Singularity, the moment when machines finally step up to the plate as the next- big thing, is seen by some more like the arrival of a new iPhone than the sudden devaluation of organic life - including our own.
Who knows? Maybe they're right. Maybe the Singularity will be cool. Awesome, even.
Or maybe they haven't had their HAL moment yet.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a devoted science fiction fan. So I was anxious to see "Ex Machina" as soon as the trailer made it's appearance on the Web. It seemed a dark film. Foreboding. Would it deliver the kind of punch to the groin that the great cautionary sci-fi of the past mustered?
The answer, sadly, is no.
This is director Alex Garland's first film and "Ex Machina's" suffers from his inexperience behind the camera. There's a large body of filmmaking now that I call the "Apple Commercial" school of filmmaking - it a highly derivative style that borrows from television advertising and is littered with visual clichés generated in a cookie-cutter ashion from Apple's movie software. This film indulges way too much from this style, so much so that feels like a thousand other bits of commercial celluloid out there in the last five years.
And these hipster trapping are at odds with the rather brutal material Garland has penned which comprises most the film. And that's my main problem with "Ex Machina" - its over-fascination with the psycho- sexual subtext of the story. For a film that promises a glimpse of the future, it's more concerned more with the same failures man is err to as a hapless slave to sex.
"Ex Machina" dangled the fascinating subject of AI and the singularity as it core but, instead, "Ex Machina" plays out less like Asimov than servo-driven de Sade. Despite occasional snippets of debate on what it means to be human, the story is little more than damsel-with-pneumatic-limbs in distress melodrama, and the cloying presence of the mad doctor's psycho-sexual sadism toward his dolls makes the film feel more like a "Red Shoes Diary" episode than than opening a book of the Golden Age. The actors are all fine, but despite being a tale of the evolution of consciousness, they're not given much of transcendence to work with. It doesn't transport viewers into a vision that could transpire for the 21st Century, but back to the 19th and misappropriate lust for the automaton of the "Tales of Hoffman," with a little "Bluebeard" thrown in for good measure or for bad.
That's why as I science fiction purist, I felt myself increasingly pulling away from "Ex Machina." There's a tawdriness that permeates the film and the story of the sweet-faced female robot being held prisoner by her Google-Age Dr. Frankenstein. About 20 minutes into the movie my hopes sank for seeing a smart little sci-fi film, when realized I wasn't going to be treated to speculation, but titillation. "Ex Machina" promised a look into the future, but feels like peek into a volume of inappropriate Victoriana.
So will "Ex Machina" be the film that challenges a generation over the error of its ways in so blindly falling for technology? Unfortunately not. No one is going to be leaving the theater desperately texting: "Hey, dude, turn off your freaking computer now!"
Which is a shame, because that's the stuff of great sci-fi.