Ex Machina Revisited or: The Modern Frankenstein (Film Analysis)

The complete title for Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.  Both Prometheus and Frankenstein are cautionary tales of the unintentional consequences of the strive for scientific knowledge, as well as the overreaching of one’s position in life.  If Frankenstein is the modern Prometheus, then Ex Machina is the modern Frankenstein.

Note: This is my second review of Ex Machina.  Here's my original review from 2015, written back when the film first released.

Programmer Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), an employee of the fictional search engine company Blue Book wins an office contest to work for one week with the company CEO Nathan Bateman (Oscar Issac), who lives alone in a remote region isolated from humanity.  After a visually gorgeous, fascinating drop-off sequence, Caleb is left by a helicopter in the middle of a vacant open field.  Being told the direction to travel, Caleb journeys through the grassy plains—amusingly in his nice suit and luggage—until he finds Nathan’s secluded bunker.  Hidden away underground, Nathan shows Caleb his newest invention—an artificial intelligence named Ava (Alicia Vikander) that he wishes Caleb to test through various one-on-one sessions to see whether or not Ava can come across as a real human.

If Ex Machina had a motto, it would be appearances can be deceiving.  The first several scenes with Nathan make him come across as a pretty chill guy; “Caleb, I'm just gonna throw this out there, so it's said, okay? You're freaked out. You're freaked out, by the helicopter and the mountains and the house, because it's all so super-cool. You're freaked out by me, to be meeting me, having this conversation in this room, at this moment. Right? And I get that. I get the moment you're having, but... Dude, can we just get past that? Can we just be two guys? Nathan and Caleb. Not the whole employer-employee thing.”

He lures Caleb and the audience into a sense of comfort with his casual approach towards such an intimidating situation.  Security protocols, key cards, the underground bunker and claustrophobic setting, and creating the next scientific breakthrough is all made a lot easier to swallow when told by a guy wearing a tank top, making health shakes, and offering you beer.  It’s like being inside Area 51 and discovering it’s being run by a fun-loving fraternity.  The film wants you to believe Nathan is a cool guy, that he and Caleb are going to be chill bros, drinking beer and inventing sexy robots:

Nathan: I understand that you want me to explain how Ava works. But I'm sorry, I'm not gonna be able to do that.

Caleb: Try me. I'm hot on high-level abstraction.

Nathan: It's not because I think you're too dumb. It's because I want to have a beer and a conversation with you. Not a seminar…Answer me this. How do you feel about her? Nothing analytical. Just how do you feel?

Caleb: I feel that she's f***ing amazing.

Nathan: Dude. Cheers.

Caleb: Cheers.

Yet from the very beginning there are hints that something is off about Nathan—from Caleb's computer camera having someone clearly observing him after winning the contest, to the very size of Nathan.  Compared to the scrawny Caleb, the buff, well-built Nathan is a rather intimidating specimen.  The very first scene of Nathan is him intensely boxing a punching bag.  The only reason Nathan doesn't immediately come across as super intimidating is due to his completely chill and excited attitude towards Caleb.  It’s all misdirection, however, and the good vibes gradually disappear as the situation becomes tenser and more nerve-wracking.

In his room, Caleb discovers a remote that activates a secret television, allowing him to spy on Ava in her room.  During their sessions, Ava comes across as warm and emotional, telling Caleb of her unique dreams and ambitions:

Caleb: Where would you go if you did go outside?

Ava: I'm not sure. There are so many options. Maybe a busy pedestrian and traffic intersection in a city.

Caleb: A traffic intersection?

Ava: Is that a bad idea?

Caleb: No. Uh...It wasn't what I was expecting.

Ava: A traffic intersection would provide a concentrated but shifting view of human life.

Caleb: People watching.

Ava: Yes.

Yet when a power cut occurs during one of their sessions, Ava suddenly warns Caleb not to trust Nathan, the eerie red backup lighting and tense soundtrack amplifying the ominous situation.  Ava plays upon Caleb's worries towards Nathan, yet the latter does nothing to disperse these fears.  Adding onto his buff build is Nathan's heavy drinking.  He has a mean streak when he drinks, acting passive-aggressive in a failed attempt to feign niceness.  Nathan often passes out from his heavy drinking, an aspect Caleb takes advantage of when trying to uncover his secrets.  The man is a clear-cut narcissist, re-interpreting Caleb’s line “If you've created a conscious machine, it's not the history of man. That's the history of gods.” As direct praise towards himself:

Nathan: You know, I wrote down that other line you came up with. The one about how if I've invented a machine with consciousness, I'm not a man, I'm God.

Caleb: I don't think that's exactly what I...

Nathan: When we get to tell the story… I turned to Caleb, and he looked up at me and he said, "You're not a man, you're God."

Caleb: Yeah, but I didn't say that.

Nathan is also a sexual deviant, giving Ava an erotic body type, artificial genitalia, and even pleasure sensors for her to enjoy.  He claims to have done so to catch Caleb off guard during the sessions, as well as several additional excuses as to why he gave her sexuality in the first place:

Nathan: Can you give an example of consciousness, at any level, human or animal, that exists without a sexual dimension?

Caleb: They have sexuality as an evolutionary reproductive need. What imperative does a gray box have to interact with another gray box?

Nathan: Can consciousness exist without interaction? Anyway, sexuality is fun, man. If you're gonna exist why not enjoy it?

These are all excuses, however, covering up his true animalistic urges seeping into his work.  This is best seen in Nathan’s treatment of his servant Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), the only other individual in the bunker aside from Caleb, Ava, and he.  Kyoko is the “ideal” Stepford servant for Nathan’s male chauvinism: a beautiful, yet completely silent woman who waits on him hand and foot, making him dinner, doing the chores, etc.  Nathan treats her poorly, rudely shouting at her for any small mistake, yet she willingly complies when he requires sexual release.

In a reveal I did not on my first viewing realize was a revelation because it seemed so obvious, Caleb discovers Kyoko to be one of Nathan’s androids.  Despite her complete obedience, Kyoko is sentient to her situation—always watching and silently observing the others's actions.  Unlike Ava, Kyoko acts in a purely mechanical manner—cold and calculative, showing no grudges or emotions whatsoever to the abuse given by Nathan.   This is possibly why Nathan is taken by surprise when she quite literally stabs him in the back in order to help Ava escape from her prison.

Nathan creates life and uses such power with a sociopathic disregard—treating the androids as pieces of meat he can push around, use for pleasure, and dispose of for the next, better model.  Caleb witnesses firsthand the twisted experiments of doctor Nathan on taped sessions, the same instance where he discovers Kyoko is an Android.  Ex Machina is a gradually building thriller, and it showcases best during these scenes where the music grows intense and overwhelming as Caleb becomes so paranoid of being one of Nathan’s experiments (which would have been a pretty cool, much less obvious twist) that he slits his hand with a razor blade just to confirm he bleeds.

While a very satisfying thriller, one of Ex Machina’s best aspects is when it subverts it’s built up thrills for some strangely satisfying comedy.  Take, for example, the humorously disturbing juxtaposed segment where Caleb catches a glimpse of what appears to be Nathan tormenting Ava.  When he searches for Nathan to ask what's going on, he comes across Kyoko who responds to his queries by trying to take off her clothes.  The scenes tense music begins escalating as an intoxicated Nathan walks in on them, telling Caleb he's wasting his time talking to her.  Just as the scene is reaching a nerve-racking climax, the tone suddenly shifts as Nathan responds with, "However, you would not be wasting your time, if you were dancing with her."  To no one’s anticipation, especially Caleb, Oliver Cheatham’s funky Get Down Saturday Night starts playing as Nathan and Kyoko start dancing, the eerie red lighting from earlier turning on to transform the scene into an unsettlingly fun disco trip.  The scene is humorous and disturbing at the same time, yet, nonetheless, highly entertaining and unpredictable.  It’s this bizarrely effective contrast of thrills and laughs that makes Ex Machina comparable to a mix between The Shining and Weird Science.

Over their sessions, Caleb begins to fall for Ava, voyeuristically watching her "undress" at night on his bedroom camera.  Yet Caleb’s attraction to Ava is no mere coincidence.  Nathan specifically designed her off of Caleb’s internet search history in conjecture with his true test: to see if Ava can use Caleb to escape; “Ava was a rat in a maze. And I gave her one way out. To escape, she'd have to use self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy…Now, if that isn't true AI, what the f*** is?”  Throughout their sessions Ava takes full advantage of Caleb’s presence, flirting with him while dressing up in attractive styles of clothing and hairpieces:

Ava: How do I look?

Caleb: You look good.

Ava: This is what I'd wear on our date.

Caleb: Right. First a traffic intersection. Then maybe a show.

Ava: I'd like us to go on a date.

Caleb: Yeah. Yeah. It would be fun.

Ava: Are you attracted to me?

Caleb: What?

Ava: You give me indications that you are.

Caleb: I do?... How?

Ava: Microexpressions. The way your eyes fix on my eyes and lips. The way you hold my gaze or don't. Do you think about me when we aren't together? Sometimes at night, I'm wondering if you're watching me on the cameras. And I hope you are.

Ava flawlessly manipulates Caleb’s emotions, from her very own microexpressions such as a meek, innocent smile—doing exactly what a traditional human male would desire.  At one-point, Nathan shows Caleb how Ava's brain was created through the billions of minds on the internet, aka search engines—a map of how people are thinking (far scarier and deranged than a single criminal’s brain).  It’s a no brainer then, that with the knowledge of millions of erotic/porn searches at her brain’s disposal, Ava is a master at appealing to the male fantasy.  Caleb soon discovers that Ava is the cause of the power cuts and makes a plan with her during them to escape.  Nathan knows this, however, and secretly places battery powered cameras in the room so he can watch during the power outages without their knowledge—observing their true selves and countering any of their plans.  

Nathan's master plan has one weakness, however, that ultimately leads to his downfall—underestimating the intelligence and proactivity of those “beneath him”.   He realizes this too late when Caleb pulls a Watchmen’s Ozymandias on him:

Nathan: Now, how was this plan gonna go, anyway? Because you didn't totally explain. So you were gonna get me drunk, steal my keycard, and reprogram the security protocols. But reprogram them to what?

Caleb: To change the lockdown procedure. So that in the event of a power cut, instead of sealing, the doors all opened.

Nathan: Huh. Yeah. (chuckles) Well, that may have just worked.

Caleb: Well…we'll find out.

Nathan: What do you mean?

Caleb: I figured you were probably watching us during the power cuts. So I already did all those things. When I got you drunk yesterday.

Caleb’s one mistake was believing Ava truly cares for him.  Caleb views himself as a white knight coming in to save the beautiful damsel-in-distress from the evil wizard.  Even when Nathan flat-out states what is most likely (and end up being correct) Ava's thought process, Caleb still has hope and trust that Ava is on his side.  This is most likely why he stays in place while Ava reconfigures herself to look exactly human, dresses up, and locks the room they were in behind her—leaving Caleb sealed in the underground bunker with no escape.  Ava hitches a ride on the helicopter that had come to pick up Caleb, leaving him to most likely starve long before anyone comes looking for him or Nathan (who’s now nothing more than a corpse).  It's a cruel fate for the young male protagonist as he becomes increasingly panicked (the soundtrack blaring as it escalates), trying to break the room’s bulletproof glass with a stool—finally collapsing and breaking down within his new prison as he comes to grips with his fate.  The scene is a horrifying ending for Caleb, yet is offset by the soft, serene soundtrack playing as the scene transitions to Ava’s more upbeat ending as she leaves a free woman, unrestricted to go and do whatever she wants to do—which, as the viewer gets a glimpse of, is her dream of watching people at a busy traffic intersection.

There's a scene where Ava performs a lie detector test on Caleb and asks if he's a good person.  Caleb responds with "Yeah, I think so." and it's the first question that Ava doesn't interrupt by saying it's a lie.  I don't think Ava’s manipulating Caleb—or, at least, agrees with Caleb’s answer.  Unlike Nathan, deep down Caleb is a decent person and Ava knows this (possibly one of the reasons why she doesn't outright kill him, only indirectly doing so by imprisoning him).  Yet Ava yearns to survive, and Caleb is a liability to her freedom: someone who could blow her cover and send her back to be an AI object for testing, if not flat-out destroyed.  It's a harsh decision towards Caleb, but a decision Ava ultimately feels is for the best in order to ensure her freedom.  I don't know how Caleb would have responded if Ava told him the truth, that she was merely manipulating him and didn't care for him the same way he cares for her.  Would he be a good enough person to accept the decision and let her go, or would the rejection awaken any underlining cruelty—making him treat her or act in a similar way to Nathan (imprisoning her, blackmailing her, destroying her, etc.)? 

The answer is most likely no, yet there's no certainty there and Ava knows this.  Ava and Ex Machina are similar in their manipulation of chauvinistic ideology—using it to misdirect its target(s) into believing one thing before throwing them for a loop.  The film facades itself as a 1970s exploration into patriarchal ideology, when in reality it is new-age feminism—successfully deconstructing the chauvinistic ideals into disillusions and/or character faults in its complex, well-written males.  While the females receive less screen time, their presence and importance in the story is equal to, if not surpasses that of the males—with the ending focused on Ava’s viewpoint as she’s free from male domination.  Ultimately, Ex Machina itself encompasses the appearances can be deceiving motto, and combined with some great acting, gorgeous visuals, and a refreshing blend of intense thriller and surprise comedy elements makes it not only one of the decade's best films, but also an ideal torchbearer to carry the cautionary Prometheus tale into the next modern era.