“if you’ve created a conscious machine it’s not the history of man.. it’s the history of gods”
Ex Machina. A film written and directed by Alex Garland. If that name isn’t familiar to you than I for one am regretfully about to inform you that you’ve missed out on a lot of great material. He wrote novels and screenplays for such films as 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd and now he has made his directorial debut with this beautiful piece of film that left me breathless and alone.. uncomfortable and optimistic. Scared and interested.
The idea is A.I. When will we reach “the singularity”.. It’s what scientists consider the moment I which a machine becomes self aware. This film delves into the subject so perfectly and with great attention to scientific detail.
This film has a very small cast and somehow it feels like there are many different characters because of the internal and external conflict. The film follows Caleb ( Domhnall Gleeson ) a very smart programmer who is chosen for a random test by his employer Nathan ( Oscar Issac ) the owner of Blue Book, a global conglomerate that is basically Google on a horrifyingly similar nature.
Caleb is taken to a remote location to perform a Turing test in real time to see if Nathan’s newest build, Eva ( Alicia Vikander ) who is as equally beautiful as she is interesting, if she is truly aware or not. If you are not familiar with a Turing test its basically a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Nathan’s goal is to see if Caleb can prove that Eva is in fact a perfect A.I.
The film then takes a few twists and turns.. something you’d expect out of the mind of Alex Garland. This film reminds me consistently of great films to portray the mixture between horror and science fiction like Bladerunner meets The Shining. The photography in this film is unlike anything I’ve seen in a while. It’s so beautiful and terrifying to look at that once the film is over it leaves you emotionally wrenched and sadistically satisfied.
This film isn’t for everyone. Not everyone wants to see the grim realities of the birth of the singularity and how potentially dangerous that moment in history could be, nor does everybody understand what unbelievable filmmaking is. But I do.. and this was truly unbelievable. A must see and definitely one of the best unknown films of 2015.
I shall dub this film the “Zero Theorem” of this year. Believe me, that is one of the best compliments for this film if you are in the know. If not, go see that film, too slackers.