Imitation Games. 'Ex Machina"

...and she took a face from the ancient gallery...

The renaissance for intelligent big budget sci-fi movies continues apace with Alex Garland's 'Ex Machina' which is probably better than any of last year's crop and is an assured and timely British film. 

Young software engineer Caleb gets to meet his genius employer Nathan at an isolated, subterranean location. After signing disclosure documents Caleb is asked to run a series of "Turing test" styled sessions with Ava, a human simulacra, to determine if she truly is an artificial intelligence. During a power outage Ava implores Caleb not to trust Nathan....and so the games begin, certainties collapse and paranoia and mistrust intensify.

It's a great set-up and immediately engaging.  We don't have a tedious build up to meeting Ava, we don't have tons of tedious pseudo-scientific exposition and we don't have our intelligence insulted.  The film is tight, tense and perfectly paced. The three leads are uniformly great and it helps that there isn't a big star name onboard to distract us. Well....I guess Oscar Isaac is a well-known actor....but here's the thing...I didn't even realise it was him until I saw the end credits. That's how good he is; that's how stupid I am. Likewise I didn't realise that Alex Garland had directed this as well as written it. It's an assured debut that simultaneously coaxes brilliant performances out of the whole cast, presents its special effects with a matter of fact nonchalance, maximises atmosphere from the minimal sets and approaches the material with intellectual rigour. We've definitely got his unadulterated vision on the screen.

It's clear to see what his influences are - 'Blade Runner', Kubrick, 'Metropolis', 'The Stepford Wives', 2000 A.D. comics, computer games. This is the stuff he will have grown up with. It's what I grew up with; probably you too. What's remarkable is that he's thrown his hat in to the ring with such iconic fare and doesn't come off looking stupid. He manages to distill the fascination and fear of artificial intelligence and fashion it into a gripping drama - something even the much vaunted 'A.I.' Kubrick/Spielberg collaboration failed to do. 

A younger Alex Garland might have been tempted to turn the last act into a slasher film - with a   psychotic killer robot on the rampage in an isolated location. There is still an element of that on show but Garland shows the restraint learnt from  scripting 'Never Let Me Go' and steers us towards a convincing and satisfying conclusion. 

I loved every moment of it and thought it was pitch perfect from the opening shots of office workers plugged in to their media devices right through to the use of Savages' 'Husbands' as the closing credits music. My palms were sweating, my mind was working overtime and I was reeling from the visceral thrill of it all. Geoff Barrow from Portishead (the band, not the place!) contributes to the excellent soundtrack and there is just an overall sheen of class and confidence to the whole project.

Objectively, it's not perfect by any means. For all the exploration of A.I. themes this is still a fable about male fear - with Ava as a monstrous female - beautiful, manipulative, unknowable. It's undeniably a film made by a man....about a genius male creator.... making a fuckable robot.... and then being afraid of it because it might just have an interior life of its own. It also has a strong element of porno chic. Maybe I was just too sensitive to that because the film was preceded by the awful trailer for 'Fifty Shades Of Grey' with which it seems to share a similar interior design aesthetic. It may not be a feminist sci-fi film then, but I don't think it's a misogynistic one either. Concerns about the eroticising of Ava are addressed in the plot and to give Garland the benefit of the doubt I do think he is making valid points about objectivisation and the eroticising of technology. He's not a leering, horny idiot - that'll be Zack Snyder.

If you know your sci-fi and/or have an interest in emerging technology then you won't find anything here that is particularly groundbreaking. The conversations between Caleb and Ava could have benefitted from a bit more depth for me. I'd have liked to have seen them challenging and testing each other on a higher philosophical level. The conversations between Caleb and Nathan hold more interest. Even so I enjoyed my first viewing immensely. Only time will tell if the film has got that repeat viewing factor. Personally I'm not sure there is enough intellectual substance here for University courses to be referencing it is a main text in ten years time. Even so, I am sure that it will provoke plenty of post cinema pub discussion about the ethics and limitations of artificial intelligence and I'm sure that was Alex Garland's intention.

Go see it!