Ex Machina

[Lu Xun]

I saw that movie lately and I think it's !@#$ing great. It's less an AI movie, or even a feminist movie, but a study in objectification. It's fascinating how everyone in the movie ultimately treats everyone else as an object, and how, in a way, Ava ultimately administers her own Turing Test to Caleb and Nathan, and they both fail.

[Godfrey]

I saw it recently as well and really dug it. The Nathan character was probably my favorite part of the movie. He just seemed so interesting to me from the first second Caleb meets him in his house. You're not really sure what to think of him and your opinion of who he is and what he's about is constantly shifting. Plus the weird/creepy/cool dance scene in the middle of the movie might be one of my favorite scenes of all time.

 

"I'm gonna tear up the !@#$ing dance floor dude, check it out."

 

Edited June 12, 2015 by Godfrey

[Lu Xun]

I don't particularly like Nathan, because I think in the end he's such a flawed character. If Caleb has his excuses, Nathan does not, and being so successful, smart, talented, and brilliant, his flaws are far less acceptable. The ending was ultimately due to Nathan's arrogance and incompetence; although I think it's brilliant the way Nathan designed his robots to actually be weaker than real human beings, alongside being fragile in almost a human way.

 

I think all throughout the movie there's a constant question of "what does it mean to be human?", and more importantly you can't assume that Nathan and Caleb are in fact the bearers of humanity.

 

One thing I do think is missing is

there is a lack of a moment of growth. I was reviewing the movie, but I don't think the ultimate fight scene can be viewed as such. Nathan definitely killed Kyouko, but he failed to kill Ava. The easiest and most correct interpretation was to say that he was way too wounded and way too shocked to do so, but what would have been more excellent and a sign of character growth would be if Nathan had refused to kill Ava, that is to say, he finally acknowledges that Ava is sentient, that she's more than the object that Nathan was treating Caleb, Kyouko, and Ava as, and while Nathan is going to die, he doesn't have to take Ava out with him.

 

Also, for some reason, I sort of see the ending as an echo of Henrik Ibsen's The Doll's House, wherein Ava, as an equivalent to Nora, finally turns her back on both Nathan and Caleb. Of course she kills Nathan, but perhaps this is a problem with my reading, but I simply can't view her as so calculating and sociopathic that she neutralizes Caleb for purely instrumental reasons. Caleb is simply not truly interesting or truly human to Ava, because Caleb, after all, simply adopted and projected a role for both Ava and himself; there was no true effort to make contact with Ava beyond the simulacrum. If Caleb, for instance, had had the wherewithal to ask "what's it like being an AI?" "How do you feel?", then perhaps Ava would have connected to Caleb on a level other than simply seeing him as a means of escape.

 

In the ending, by stripping the skin from the other prototypes, and getting herself her own hair, she's adopted her own humanity and finally she exists on her own terms, not that of Nathan and not that of Caleb. And in walking out, not unlike Nora, it's an abandonment of responsibility, because Caleb stands a reasonable chance of dying before being rescued.

 

And after all, while it may seem despondent than Ava never actually loved Caleb and simply saw him as a means to an end, Caleb, on the other hand, never loved Ava either. He was in love with the role, with her feminine wiles, with a particular simulacrum. I think that it was completely possible for him to watch Ava reassemble herself, rebuild herself, and becomes something completely different, but his entire demeanor throughout the affair is one of terror. He had the option to do so, but if he actually cared for Ava he should have been happy for her, because after all, she's not just an AI, she's a sentience. She's embracing her personhood, and that Caleb responded that way, at the end, is why she does so alone.

 

 

(Updated spoilers)

 

Also, @ Harminator:

 

You can only be a MRA until you've been beaten up and gay-raped a couple of times. I would consider myself an androgynist with feminist sympathies; I'm enough on the MRA / !@#$ minority whining-side that I can't fully embrace the feminist program because I think it denies fundamental facts of biology, but on the other hand, if women are anything other than breeders and !@#$-toys you have to accept their fundamental humanity, and be able to make contact with their humanity.

 

As mentioned before, the problem with the movie is that Nathan objectifies Caleb just as much as Nathan and Caleb objectify Ava, and Caleb in turn objectifies Nathan. It's an immensely spergy movie in that there's no real attempt at understanding, which is why Nathan gets the ending he meets and why Caleb also gets the ending he encounters. Only Ava, because she's the most victimized, gets something resembling a happy ending.

Edited June 13, 2015 by Inst

[Reagan]

It's pretty deep. Well thought out response above. Ultimately, whether it made sense or not, I wasn't happy with the ending. Very entertained throughout and definitely thought provoking, but disappointed with the end.

[Lu Xun]

Once again, I can't recommend Henrik Ibsen enough. You could call him childish in the same way Wagner is childish, but his problem plays are awesome, especially if you consider how revolutionary and shocking they were at the time by attacking conventional Victorian morality (Hedda Gabler is about a woman who kills herself because her life is empty and sterile, the Wild Duck is about the naive optimism of progressives resulting in tragedy, the Enemy of the People, on the other hand, is about a man who states a truth, but is vilified by his community for being inconvenient).

 

Compare the ending of Ex Machina to the ending of The Doll's House. In The Doll's House, Nora discovers that her husband is not the man she thought he was; that is to say, that while she loved her husband irredeemably and was willing to sacrifice her completeness as a human being to be a wife and a mother, her husband was ultimately self-centered, career-oriented, and materialistic.

 

The crisis that provoked that discovery, of course, goes away as though a god descended from a machine (pun-intended), but her realization does not. She confronts her husband, who begs her to stay, ultimately offers to treat her better in every way, but because he cannot meet her spiritual needs, she walks out. "It would take the greatest miracle of all [for our marriage to be recommenced]", and the husband replies, "The greatest miracle of all..." to which Nora slams the door shut.

 

Now, compared to Ex Machina, is that an unsatisfying ending? If it's an unsatisfying ending, is it deliberately unsatisfying and unsatisfying in an artistic and adult way? Once again, mentioning Wagner, Wagner in Tristan und Isolde deliberately engineers his sound structure so that the tension that is created throughout the opera is never resolved, as to invoke a sense of infinite yearning, the lovesickness of the protagonists, albeit to resolve at the end. Does Ex Machina's ending function similarly; like, if Caleb is the viewpoint character, after the particular ending, are you left in despair and confusion as to why Ava chose to leave?

 

Emotionally, I could say it's similar to certain plot twists in certain other forms of literature, I'm name-dropping too much, but I think it's akin to Mishima's Sea of Fertility Tetralogy. What he does at the very end of the very last novel is that he makes a revelation that completely inverts the nature of the series, making you question every conclusion and every experience throughout what are essentially 1000 or 2000 pages. That means you reread the entire novel to see how the meaning changes, and if you had Ex Machina on Blu-Ray, you would rewatch the movie to rewatch it with your new understanding. That is what I think is the purpose of the unsatisfying ending; you want to resolve your despair and confusion, so you rewatch the movie paying attention to other aspects.

Edited June 14, 2015 by Inst

[Cornelius]

A very interesting movie.

 

 

 

At first when I saw the ending, I assumed that Ava was being deliberately cruel to Caleb by leaving him to probably starving to death, but then it was pointed out to me later that he was the only person alive at that point that knew that Ava was not human. To keep her secret, she had to leave him to die. You could argue that she should have killed him outright, but she only barely survived the encounter with Nathan, as you guys pointed out Nathan made sure to keep the AIs weaker than himself so that he could physically overpower them if necessary. Maybe Ava decided that risking herself against Caleb was not worth it, better to disappear into the world. Maybe she even allowed the small chance of survival as a favor, but didn't let him out herself in case he didn't respond well to her not wanting to go with him. Which would've been a clear failing of Caleb had that happened, but she never really gave him that chance.

 

Caleb has his failings, sure, but he didn't actually do much of anything wrong. He certainly didn't want to seem to kill anybody. I think coming down too hard on his character is a bit presumptuous.

 

Nathan's failing, other than exploiting AIs and Caleb for that matter, is trusting Kyouko. He had the situation well in hand until he got stabbed in the back. Of course, there's also his getting blind drunk that allowed everything that happened after, but that's not a character flaw so much as a personal failing. I honestly think he only killed Kyouko as a reaction to being stabbed (which is honestly understandable) and when Ava finished the job I don't think he was much in condition to do anything. I don't know if he deliberately let Ava go, but I think it was more realizing that he was going to die and regretting living such an isolated life.

 

[Jaime Lannister]

Oscar Isaac certainly impressed me in the film, he might have had the best character I've seen on screen so far this year.  Loved him, faults and all.

Edited June 21, 2015 by Jaime Lannister