Ex Machina

Anything that involves any sort of artificial intelligence freaks me out.  Probably more than anything else in the world.  I said I wanted a Baja Blast to my boyfriend last weekend and now I'm getting quite the array of advertisements for Taco Bell on Facebook.  Are they listening to me?  Will they develop their own intelligence and eventually become the dominant species to rule the planet?

I guess we'll never know.  Let's talk about Ex Machina now.

It all starts with the main character, Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) wins an office contest to go off on a trip to a secluded location in the middle of a peaceful forest where the CEO of his company, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), lives.

Beautiful, isn't it?  Just wait.

Nathan shows Caleb his newest and most advanced experiment with artificial intelligence, a humanlike robot named Ava.  Over many trials and tribulations, Caleb continues to perform a series of tasks to find out if she is truly capable of human thought despite the fact that she is a robot.

As time passes, Caleb starts to develop genuine feelings for Ava after Ava temporarily shuts the power off in the house so Nathan can't overhear their conversations, and they can have private conversations of their own.  He learns more about Ava that he never expected to hear, which causes him to eventually feel romantically attracted to her.

This is when Ava tells him that Nathan is a liar, and that Caleb shouldn't trust anything he says.  This is where things start to get a little fishy to me.  In a movie like this, the point of Ava developing a relationship with Caleb is so the audience starts to trust her as well, especially since the director of the film paints her to be a trapped, helpless woman locked in a room by a powerful man.

I wanted to trust Ava at this point because I was biased to the fact that she developed a relationship to the main character and she disclosed personal information about her feelings, which Nathan didn't even think she was capable of doing.  It makes me uncomfortable that I started to feel sorry for a robot with artificial intelligence, and I started to take her side.

Anyways, after Caleb finds out all of this information from Ava, they develop a plan to escape after she cuts the power again.  However, Nathan finds out about this plan via a battery operated camera and tries to tell Caleb that Ava is just tricking Caleb into thinking they have a real relationship so she can escape.  Foolish of him to assume that Caleb would back down at that point.

Well, Nathan was right, and Caleb is pretty dense.

Overall, this film didn't have me fooled, but I think that's because I came into it already being extremely skeptical and untrusting of every kind of artificial intelligence.  I'm assuming if you were to view this from an alternate perception of artificial intelligence, whether it be unknowing or just not having an opinion at all, you may have felt sorry for Caleb.  I'm proud to say I didn't, but the whole manipulation aspect of the film was kind of unnerving.

I'm going to watch it again anyways.