By Nadia Ranaputri
With the two leads delivering clashing performances, Alicia Vikander comes on the screen and steals the light. The
thing with Artificial Intelligence is that they will always be deceiving. We’ve
seen it before with Terminators, Ultron, and the hosts from Michael Crichton’s
Westworld. Vikander’s Ava fits the latter, but somehow her portrayal of this
certain AI is unlike the others. She charms and wonders as her sessions with
Caleb become more personal.
There’s also an element of foreshadowing in this
film, and it’s used with subtlety. Ex Machina
has these foreshadowing elements that go unnoticed until the final shot of
the film, which is why it is a film that does require full attention to
actually get it. The foreshadowing mostly lies within the dialogues. It’s one
of those rare movies that make you want to watch again to see whether you
caught those little hints of foreshadowing.
Director: Alex Garland
Cast: Domnhall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander, Sonoya Mizuno
There are many films about Artificial
Intelligence. You name them. I Robot, A.I, The Terminator franchise, and of
course, Avengers: Age of Ultron. But the thing is, most of the movies mentioned
earlier are well-known and rely heavily on CGI and action sequences. Ex Machina
is a different kind of A.I movie.
Cast: Domnhall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander, Sonoya Mizuno
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| Source: Drive-in Zeppelin |
Ex Machina tells a story about Caleb Smith (Domnhall
Gleeson), an advanced coder who is offered the opportunity to spend the week
with his company’s CEO, Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Upon his visit, Caleb discovers it to be more
than just spending a week with the CEO. Nathan, the genius that he is, created an A.I (who
he named Ava) and has chosen Caleb as a human component to take part in the
Turing Test, a test to determine whether a machine can have consciousness.
However, Caleb then finds himself torn by loyalty as his relationship with Nathan
and Ava are put to the test.
Domnhall Gleeson has done a great job portraying the
ultimately smart yet innocent Caleb. His character acts as an audience to the
story and the movie plays that element well. As his character progresses,
there’s a feeling of uneasiness and nuance that is set out once Caleb discovers
a much deeper meaning behind Nathan’s creation.
Oscar Isaac is the opposite of our protagonist as
Nathan. From the moment you see his character; you know something’s off, and
the film presses hard on that. What the film does so well with Nathan is that
he seems like an easy-going guy, but Oscar Isaac does such an immersive
job with creating layers that stack up during as the film progresses.
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| Source: Evening Standard |
It’s a slow film, but its small hints of nuance and
dread lingers as we see these three characters interact on an isolated
facility. The film isn’t afraid to show its colors, and it shows through Geoff
Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s score as well as the film’s use of dim colors and
luscious cinematography. The film also manages to put the Norway landscape to
good use, providing wide and stunning landscape shots.
There are expositions in this film, but they never
seem to falter. As expositions go, Ex
Machina finds a way to make them interesting, as these expositions are
delivered brilliantly by its cast. It’s also quite obligatory, because of
course, the audience wants to know how the hell Nathan made his A.I. It doesn’t
go too far into details on how Nathan did it, but it does give some general
expositions on how his A.I thinks and how he brought her to life.
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| Source: Awards Daily |
One negative I can take from the film is that at times, there are elements that do feel unsettling, at least to me. It's only a small negative, but the unsettling elements are sometimes shown more than once.
But in all, Ex Machina
is
really the kind of film that reminded me that in a time where big budget sci-fi
action films rule the cinema, there is a sci-fi film that doesn’t require
action or big budget effects to hook me in. Upon first viewing, I could not
stop thinking about it for days. It’s quite rare that such a film is able to do
something like that. Ex Machina is
truly the kind of film that wants you to think, and wants you to focus until
the very end, which is why I consider it to be one of the best sci-fi films that I've seen.
Stars: 4.7/5
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