Ex Machina
"If you've created a conscious machine, it's not the history of man. That's the history of gods."
Ex Machina is (in my humble opinion) the best movie of the 2010s. It's a film that excels on so many levels. It's visually stunning, well-acted and armed with a gripping narrative that boasts some keen dialogues from characters that are well drawn. The story is set in a recluse high-tech villa where a young programmer <PERSON> joins his boss <PERSON> to participate in an experiment that involves testing the artificial intelligence of a humanoid robot (Ava).
Conversations between <PERSON> and <PERSON> start timidly, slipping into commonplaces and breaking the ice. <PERSON> tries to set the session rules; However, soon the roles are reversed and it is <PERSON> who is put to the test. What initially seems like a relatively conventional technical assessment takes a Hitchcockian twist. Humans and machines lie for different reasons. <PERSON> only wanted <PERSON> to test the robot because of his personality and thought he'd fall easily for <PERSON>. 217
And as <PERSON> starts doubting his boss's motives, he succumbs to <PERSON>'s power of seduction. Little by little, the intrigue builds as the android presents herself as a classic damsel in distress, when in reality she's just a femme fatale holding the strings of her master.
Through this intimate setup and thoughtful dialogues that provides enough information to pique the viewer's curiosity without patronizing them with technological minutiae or wagonloads of data, <PERSON> develops this movie's themes by making various philosophical and religious references throughout. There's the obvious connection to <PERSON>'s allegory of the cave with the way the robots are caged and the final scene where we see the shadows at the intersection. The seven sessions in which the test is conducted hark back to the week of biblical Genesis. There's also the reference to <PERSON>’s Blue Book as the name of <PERSON>’s social media empire amongst other things.
While many different threads are aptly and subtly explored in the narrative such as patriarchy, god complex etc., Ex Machina mainly puts its focus on the nature of consciousness. One might see the ending as proof that <PERSON> isn't human since she left <PERSON> imprisoned. Maybe she was just simulating human emotion and truly saw <PERSON> as nothing more than a means of escape but I also think that the opposite could also be argued. Maybe <PERSON> left <PERSON> inside because she convinced herself that he wasn't a good person as him not helping <PERSON> meant that he only helped <PERSON> because he fell in love with her. Whichever way you look at it, there's no doubt that Ex Machina is one of the most brilliant contemporary sci-fi films around artificial intelligence. 80