Ex Machina - review: 'Frankenstein’s monster is no longer a galumphing male: she’s female now and foxy'

Alex Garland’s vision of Alicia Vikander as a robot is as thrilling as it is predictable
Frankenstein turns foxy: Alicia Vikander’s robot Ava is at the heart of the Gothic drama
David Sexton23 January 2015

There are some texts that really do help to explain the world: texts that can’t be recalled too often, meditated on too long. There’s a classic example in How the Mind Works by the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, well worth committing to memory, if not appropriating as a tattoo, I’d say, for men and women alike: “Zoologists have found that the males of many species will court an enormous range of objects having a vague resemblance to the female: other males, females of the wrong species, females of the right species that have been stuffed and nailed to a board, parts of stuffed females such as a head suspended in mid-air, even parts of stuffed females with important features missing like the eyes and the mouth.”

It’s all you need to know to navigate so much of life more smartly. Ex Machina, an elegant little variation on the theme, is the first film to have been directed as well as written by Alex Garland, the novelist (The Beach, The Tesseract) and scriptwriter (28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go, Dredd).

Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, a twentysomething slightly geeky computer programmer working for BlueBook, “the world’s most popular internet search engine”. In a brief intro we see him at his terminal in a Google-type office getting the news through his screen that he’s won first prize in some sort of competition. At once he’s off, flying in a helicopter through grand landscapes of northern forests, to stay for a week in the remote retreat of the creator and owner of BlueBook, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a menacing presence: bald and bearded, alcoholic but muscular, hefting weights and slamming a punchbag. Nathan is brilliant but unpredictable, a bit of a Colonel Kurtz, holed up in the fjords. Cool! It’s a trip! All Alex Garland’s creations are a trip.

After being shown the windowless, subterranean cell he’ll be staying in, Caleb learns that the reason he’s there is to be “the human component in a Turing test”. Can he be fooled by a computer into believing it’s human? In the usual version, the computer’s hidden and there are no visual clues — but Nathan has gone a step further. “The real test is to show you that she’s a robot and then see if you still feel she has intelligence,” he says.

Enter Ava, for Session 1 — the film is structured as a series of such sessions and we soon realise that, for all its punctuation with sweeping views of the epic Scandi landscape outside, it is actually an interior chamber piece, with just three or four players in a highly stylised set. It could be a play.

Ava is pretty obviously a machine, her legs and arms being metal struts and her torso transparent, displaying shiny cables and processors, and she moves jerkily with a buzzing of servers when she turns her neck. On the other hand, she’s wearing shorts, more or less, and a meshy sports bra over her impressive bust.

And she’s played not by a robot but, most unfairly, by the adorable Alicia Vikander who, as anybody who has seen Testament of Youth will testify, is not only pretty as a picture but has a preternatural talent for tugging at the heart.

So dimmy Caleb’s suckered in no time. “How do you feel about her?” Nathan asks after their first session. “I feel that she’s fucking amazing!” says Caleb, earnestly. “Dude! Cheers!” Nathan ripostes.

Soon Ava is asking Caleb if he wants to be her friend and he’s telling her about being an orphan and single and she shows him what she would wear if they went on a date, looking like a real girl...

Feebly, Caleb does ask Nathan if Ava has deliberately been programmed to flirt with him — and even, in the film’s funniest, closest-to-the-bone line for laddy fans: “Did you design Ava’s face based on my pornography profile?”

“Hey, if a search engine’s good for anything...” Nathan says. But it’s too late. Ava has Caleb in thrall. She tells him that Nathan’s not his friend and asks him if he’s a good person. “What will happen to me? Do you think I might be switched off?” What can he do? Ex Machina turns Gothic and Bluebeardy as it spins to a pretty predictable close. It’s a short story, over-extended.

Frankenstein’s monster is no longer a galumphing male: she’s female now and foxy. You could say this is feminist science fiction, exposing male fantasy. But more likely it is that fantasy itself, playing around inhuman femininity (quite dodgily, you do eventually get the full Alicia, nude).

Ex Machina would be much more challenging if it didn’t follow on from two superb films exploring the same territory, Spike Jonze’s Her, in which Scarlett Johansson is a disembodied seductress, and Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, in which she is improbably embodied. A vague resemblance suffices? Tell me about it.

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