"Ex Machina"
Reviews have been almost uniformly positive, so expectations were high as we ventured to the local talking picture establishment to catch this yesterday afternoon. We were not disappointed. I'll go easy on the spoilers.
Kind of a thought experiment for three voices. Well-done sets (a billionaire's remote Alaska retreat) and spectacular scenery, mainly in the establishing shots, with Norway standing in for Greater Wasilla.
The premise: eccentric billionaire/computer genius, played as the love child of Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs, only without either man's empathy, human warmth or diffident humility, invites an employee (the mogul owns "Blue Book," a kind of uber-Google that has replaced its inferior search engine predecessors—hold that thought!) to spend a week at Xanadu to evaluate the performance of humanoid fembot AI "Ava," nicely portrayed by a Swedish ex-ballerina with a healthy dollop of CGI. Intelligently scripted, and works in a lot of conversations on the nature of intelligence and of consciousness; of authenticity versus simulation and/or deception; appearance, reality, and their overlaps. What would it mean for human beings to devise true machine sentience? On what basis would relations between the two kinds of consciousness be conducted? In less competent hands the script could have turned out sounding like a particularly cringeworthy undergraduate bull session, but the writer/director has the chops to pull it off.
It is in the nature of sci-fi flicks (and this counts as one, although more of the "twenty minutes into the future" variety) to demand a suspension of disbelief, which I willingly proffered here, but all too frequently this is received with rough contempt for the viewer's intelligence (example: the Jurassic Park sequel in which a T-Rex escapes from a secure cargo hold, eats the crew [on the bridge as well, without, however, doing any apparent structural damage to it], steers the ship perfectly toward its scheduled berth and then locks itself back in the hold). Nothing like that here, although some naysayers on the IMDB boards argue unpersuasively otherwise. YMMV, as might the limits of your suspension of disbelief—though nothing here remotely approaches the ess of dee required to get through any space opera that relies on FTL travel—but I'm confident (in part on the basis of those IMDB posts) that the only audience members who will throw up their hands are compulsive contrarians.
Did I mention (closest I'll come to a spoiler, I hope) that it gets around to a satisfying, or at least better than tantalizing, dollop of female nudity? Also, there's a brief dance sequence that one reviewer has described as "exhilaratingly stupid," though I'd have let it go at "exhilarating." Toward the end I worried briefly that the story was going to veer into much more conventional territory, but just after worry had escalated to outright alarm I was reassured (something of the same effect obtained near the end of The Lives of Others—if you have not seen this, run and do not walk to the local video emporium, or to your home computer to queue it up on your video stream—and I was similarly relieved when the director Did Not Go There), and wondered afterward whether this emotional sequence of mine might have been arrived at of set purpose by the director: it would certainly dovetail with an earlier riff on magicians, misdirection and pretty girls.
Speaking of love children, I'd say that Ex Machina is the baby that might have resulted had Blade Runner ever fucked My Fair Lady, with Frankenstein standing godfather. It's one of those films I could sit through a second time within 24 hours just to savor the details at each point in the full context of the flick. It might be a stretch to call the thing profound, but it's certainly very intelligent.
See this. If your only option at the moment is some ghastly multiplex owned by a soulless conglomerate, wait for it to be available on your home screen. If, as in Oakland, you can put your moviegoer dime (eighty dimes in my case: I get the "senior citizen" discount!) in the coffers of an independent operator, then by all means see it in the company of a hundred or so strangers. It's two hours of your life you won't begrudge.
cordially,
Edit: link to YouTube clip
Kind of a thought experiment for three voices. Well-done sets (a billionaire's remote Alaska retreat) and spectacular scenery, mainly in the establishing shots, with Norway standing in for Greater Wasilla.
The premise: eccentric billionaire/computer genius, played as the love child of Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs, only without either man's empathy, human warmth or diffident humility, invites an employee (the mogul owns "Blue Book," a kind of uber-Google that has replaced its inferior search engine predecessors—hold that thought!) to spend a week at Xanadu to evaluate the performance of humanoid fembot AI "Ava," nicely portrayed by a Swedish ex-ballerina with a healthy dollop of CGI. Intelligently scripted, and works in a lot of conversations on the nature of intelligence and of consciousness; of authenticity versus simulation and/or deception; appearance, reality, and their overlaps. What would it mean for human beings to devise true machine sentience? On what basis would relations between the two kinds of consciousness be conducted? In less competent hands the script could have turned out sounding like a particularly cringeworthy undergraduate bull session, but the writer/director has the chops to pull it off.
It is in the nature of sci-fi flicks (and this counts as one, although more of the "twenty minutes into the future" variety) to demand a suspension of disbelief, which I willingly proffered here, but all too frequently this is received with rough contempt for the viewer's intelligence (example: the Jurassic Park sequel in which a T-Rex escapes from a secure cargo hold, eats the crew [on the bridge as well, without, however, doing any apparent structural damage to it], steers the ship perfectly toward its scheduled berth and then locks itself back in the hold). Nothing like that here, although some naysayers on the IMDB boards argue unpersuasively otherwise. YMMV, as might the limits of your suspension of disbelief—though nothing here remotely approaches the ess of dee required to get through any space opera that relies on FTL travel—but I'm confident (in part on the basis of those IMDB posts) that the only audience members who will throw up their hands are compulsive contrarians.
Did I mention (closest I'll come to a spoiler, I hope) that it gets around to a satisfying, or at least better than tantalizing, dollop of female nudity? Also, there's a brief dance sequence that one reviewer has described as "exhilaratingly stupid," though I'd have let it go at "exhilarating." Toward the end I worried briefly that the story was going to veer into much more conventional territory, but just after worry had escalated to outright alarm I was reassured (something of the same effect obtained near the end of The Lives of Others—if you have not seen this, run and do not walk to the local video emporium, or to your home computer to queue it up on your video stream—and I was similarly relieved when the director Did Not Go There), and wondered afterward whether this emotional sequence of mine might have been arrived at of set purpose by the director: it would certainly dovetail with an earlier riff on magicians, misdirection and pretty girls.
Speaking of love children, I'd say that Ex Machina is the baby that might have resulted had Blade Runner ever fucked My Fair Lady, with Frankenstein standing godfather. It's one of those films I could sit through a second time within 24 hours just to savor the details at each point in the full context of the flick. It might be a stretch to call the thing profound, but it's certainly very intelligent.
See this. If your only option at the moment is some ghastly multiplex owned by a soulless conglomerate, wait for it to be available on your home screen. If, as in Oakland, you can put your moviegoer dime (eighty dimes in my case: I get the "senior citizen" discount!) in the coffers of an independent operator, then by all means see it in the company of a hundred or so strangers. It's two hours of your life you won't begrudge.
cordially,
Edit: link to YouTube clip
