“Isn’t it strange, to create something that hates you?”
It’s hard to find smart, thought-provoking science fiction stories these days, with current trends dictating bigger is better. Writer-Director Alex Garland’s EX MACHINA, released this past April, was small-scale, slow-paced, and breaks no new ground in terms of ideas. Yet thanks to a terrific script, exceptional characterizations, and one super-sexy robot, it was the best new science fiction film I’d seen since UNDER THE SKIN. Like Garland’s earlier scripts, which gave us fresh takes on the zombie genre (28 DAYS LATER) and the space-flight-to-save-the-earth genre (SUNSHINE), EX MACHINA took a familiar sci-fi concept, in this case the replication of human presence via artificial means, and makes it new.
EX MACHINA told the story of Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a low-ranking worker bee at Bluebook, the world’s “biggest internet search engine”. The film opened with him winning an in-company competition for the opportunity to spend a week at the remote Bond-lairish estate of reclusive Bluebook founder Nathan. Once he’s arrived by helicopter, Caleb hesitantly agrees to sign “the mother of all non-disclosure agreements” and is put up in a basement room with no windows or handles on the door. Nathan had written the Bluebook code when he was just 13 and now twenty years later he’s a disco-dancing, weight-lifting weirdo, nicely played by Oscar Isaac as a childishly brooding drunk. “Have you heard of the Turing test?” Nathan asks Caleb, for what he really wants his employee to do is to spend time with his newest invention, the gorgeous robot Ava (Alicia Vikander) and to test her true intelligence. Pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing created a test in 1950 to examine a machine’s ability to present behavior indistinguishable from a human’s. Nathan wants Caleb to apply this test to Ava, who looks and acts like a real human being (except her midsection and forearms which are clearly robotic) and who seems to despise her maker. Aware she’s constantly monitored by Nathan’s cameras, Ava causes power outages to steal a few moments between polite small talk with Caleb about childhood memories to warn the lowly programmer not to trust the boss. Ava’s questions about the earlier versions of herself – whose sculpted, life masks line the walls of Nathan’s highly secured house – lead Caleb to suspect that she may soon be headed for the recycling bin. The more time he spends with Ava – who begins to express romantic feelings for Caleb – the more he becomes determined to rescue her from her mad inventor, especially after discovering Nathan’s disturbing collection of sexually fetishized robot corpses. Things get creepy when Nathan informs Caleb that Ava’s capable of sex – after all, he’s got his own foxy Asian paramour (Sonoya Mizuno) who he may or may not have created somewhere in his lab. It soon turns out that there’s an disturbing reason why the lowly programmer finds himself falling for Miss robot.
EX MACHINA was a classy slice of cerebral sci-fi with a literary-cinematic heritage stretching back through BLADE RUNNER and METROPOLIS to FRANKENSTEIN. Garland made an impressive debut behind camera, effectively directing with remote, minimal style. Swedish actress Alicia Vikander excelled in the film’s most important role as the sleek, sexy robot who struggles to come to terms with her humanity (or lack of it), giving a performance more about intuition and gesture than dialogue. The only real special effect in the film was the presentation of Ava with a human face, but mostly composed of wires and a partly transparent body, and it was seamless. An electro soundtrack by Geoff Barrow added to the retro sci-fi air of EX MACHINA, a terrific film.
EX MACHINA will be released by Lionsgate Films on Blu-ray on July 15th and We Are Movie Geeks has had a sneak peek
The AVC encoded 1080p image is in 2.40:1. The digital photography never feels glossy or flat, soaking up detail and color with faultless precision. Image clarity is outstanding. The picture is naturally sharp and the resolution brings out plenty of beautifully intricate textures throughout including the rubbery robot bodies and the silvery sterile confines of Nathan’s lair. Black levels, critical to several scenes, are deep and satisfying. Skin tones raise no alarms. The picture suffers from no egregious examples of banding, aliasing, blocking, or other eyesores. This is a terrific transfer.
The DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 excels in what is an overall quiet film. Dialogue delivery is clear and center-focused while the score by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury is the big winner here, playing with a natural, by-design sharpness much of the time.
The extras are generous:
- Through the Looking Glass: Making Ex Machina is a 40-minute featurette that contains some excellent interviews that address the philosophical as well as the technical issues of EX MACHINA.
- SXSW Q&A with Cast and Crew runs one hour and is a conversation from March 2015 featuring Alex Garland, Oscar Isaac, Rob Hardy, Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury.
- Behind the Scenes Vignettes runs 29 minutes and is broken up into 9 chapters
