Ex Machina

I enjoy big budget Hollywood films. They are filled with big money special effects and big money familiar faces.  Every year you know that as soon as you get to May, the summer blockbuster season is about to begin.  Thankfully though, these aren’t the only types of films that are made.  Sometimes something that gets made on a smaller scale allows for more creative exploration.  Ex Machina is that type of film.

The film marks the directorial debut of Alex Garland and stars Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, and Oscar Isaac.  Gleeson plays a mid-level employee at a fictional tech firm which happens to be the world’s dominant search engine provider.  He wins a company lottery to be taken to the remote, private estate of the company’s founder for a special week.  Shortly after he arrives and meets the prodigy founder, he learns that the private residence also functions as a research facility.  The research focus is artificial intelligence and Gleeson’s actual task to to test the AI to determine if it’s behavior really is indistinguishable from a human.  He slowly learns that nothing is as it seems.

The great thing about Ex Machina is that it is intellectually sincere in every way a science fiction film should be.  While Hollywood has a tendency to transform any sort of science fiction into nonstop excitement and action, Ex Machina is purely designed to elicit thought and raise questions.  What does it really mean for a machine to be artificially intelligent?  How would such a machine behave?  How would it interact with people?  How should people interact with it?  What is humanity’s responsibility towards that machine?  What will happen when we pass the technological singularity and machines become more advanced than humans?

As always, many of those answers vary greatly depending on who is involved.  The characters involved in this film are all flawed in different ways, just as everyone is.  These flaws significantly impact the design of the AI and what kinds of interactions the AI has with people.  The same will of course be true in real life as such technology is developed.  The creators will have their own flaws which will drive how and what is developed and for what purpose.

Ex Machina is a phenomenal film – the type you wish could come out every month.  It is the rare type of film which will leave you pondering about its meaning and implications for days.