"Ex Machina" R
So far this year there have been very few movies on the radar. This one is a modern day Frankenstein story with some of the feel of 'Ghost in the Shell', 'Simone' and 'AI' (only in that there's an AI and an escape attempt) and a nod to various sexy robot movies and cartoons.
The story opens with a young hotshot programmer being accepted into the Blue Book company's contest. Blue Book in this is Facebook and Google stuck together, but also Project Blue Book, the alien fringe thing. In the film, this wacky inventor, Nathan, and drunken scientist lives in a Swedish mountain chalet, even though it is supposed to be Alaska, where he invited employee Caleb to check out his new robot AI named Ava.
The strange man lives alone with a house girl that doesn't speak, which should be a tip off that he's nuts, but then he boxes and gets drunk and claims he has all kinds of time. He also wants to be a cyber god. Yes, ego is not his problem.
Through Caleb and Ava's conversations he is trying to pass the outdated Turing test model for intelligence, which was developed before modern computers, and would be like telling a toaster from a smart phone. Even so, the movie is rife it references to movies, the Internet, and the shocking kinks people might be into through that.
The movie though never actually goes there with the kinks. They keep implying the robot is great for a love doll but they never do this. The R rating is merely for nudity and for the F bombs uttered every now and then when the nerd talk becomes banal and hard to follow or the drinking talk gets too garbled. In fact, most of the nudity is modest and really where this 1990 it would be PG 13. Besides, three of the nudes are robot nudes in a closet, so technically a nude android is not a nude.
The strange tropes start with Nathan's obsession with proving his new model is the best ever, coupled with Calbel's complete obliviousness to being in a house with an older version of the guy from Disturbia crossed with Doc Frankenstein himself. (The monster wasn't named Frankenstein). Then it's onto the main plot about Ava's clear desire to run off into the woods the next chance she gets. She can't be blamed for this as she had been locked up inside that weird underground house all that time.
As this movie just came out, this review cannot include spoilers about who's a robot and who isn't, but let it be said first here that the scene in the trailer with the cutting at the mirror part is not what you think.
So is it a good movie? It has promise but it's no spectacular. Sure it's nice to have some fem bot played by a Swedish actress. Most of that though they CGI over to make her look uncanny so it's not at all hot. (The nudity is later).
So Caleb being a self respecting nerd refuses to go on his boss's suggestion and take the robot for a spin, even though he likes her. Where is Frank Zappa when you need him to bust into song? He not only sung of magical cyborg pigs, but also of artificial Rhonda...So there ya go, ahead of his time. Maybe he was a robot?I've been waiting for several reviews to actually use that joke and make it apply totally. It does!
The villain is pretty obvious from the start but the hero is equally clueless and unable to figure it out, until his mirror watching moment. Aside fro the leaps of logic, it's not a bad thriller.
Review by Adam Browne
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