by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright April 2015
Ex Machina is a fine movie with interesting characters, setting and nice pacing. The exploration of the science premise, artificial intelligence in a robot acting like a human, is well handled too. All-in-all, an interesting movie to watch. There are some inconsistencies, but they don't get in the way of exploring the AI premise.
This is a story about Nathan, an eccentric high tech billionaire who has a hobby of building human-looking robots with human-imitating intelligence. He invites Caleb, an aspiring brilliant young worker at one of his companies to come to his far-from-the-maddening-crowd vacation home for a week-long reward vacation. While Caleb is there, Nathan shows him one of the fruits of his hobby efforts, Ava, an intelligent robot, and lets him Turing Test her for the week.
The biggest inconsistencies in the movie show up at the beginning and end. They center around Nathan, the eccentric billionaire, and his hideaway. The movie opens with Caleb going to the hideaway. The hideaway is way too remote. Because of this remoteness it is not getting food or other supplies, and Nathan is not consulting with other people around the world and getting neat new ideas and gizmos that will advance this hobby. Advancing something like this is like advancing personal computers was back in the 1980's -- it benefits a whole lot from chattering with other enthusiasts. Likewise, Nathan himself spends too much time drinking and exercising, and not enough on sciencing or being a business person.
These are the inconsistency vices of this remoteness. The virtues are that the movie setting and pacing are interesting, simple and easy to keep relevant. There is no need for chase scenes or fancy stunts. This is a strong virtue, so I forgive the inconsistency. The movie turns out well.
Ex Machina was entertaining. I'm happy it was made, and I'm happy to have seen it.
And now some self-promotion: If you liked this movie, I have stories with similar themes about AI mixing with humans in my up-and-coming Tales of Technofiction book, working titled Visions of 2050. It should be out later this year.
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