Ex Machina by Alex Garland

Ex Machina provided the audience with new thought provoking ideas in the world of technology and by extension, androids. Although interviewing androids with A.I. has been done before, Ex Machina created new imagery with how humanoid robots look and act. The story itself had a simple premise with little complexity and a predicable ending. However, the characters made up for the simple plot. There were only a total of 4 characters and one character didn’t even speak. With Ava, the A.I. robot, using manipulation, sexuality, empathy, and sympathy to trick Caleb into helping her escape, her character made up for the lack of complexity in the plot. Her being an A.I. distracted the audience from the simple plot. Nathan Bateman wasn’t a typical scientist. He was a loner in his fortress and drank till he was black out drunk. Yet somehow, he created Ava. Caleb Smith was a humble programmer. He didn’t boast his intelligence or creations, he was merely fascinated with advanced technology and wanted to someday be a part of it. Kyoko, another A.I. robot, didn’t speak throughout the whole. Nathan revealed that he removed her linguistic functions in her “brain”. Kyoko merely became Nathan’s sex reliever and servant. From removing Kyoko’s ability to speak and making her servant and sex object, raised questions as to whether or not Nathan was an abusive creator. It also raised the question as to why he created the A.I.s. He never revealed why, but simple remarked that he could so why not make them?

The script had quite a few unanswered questions or ambiguous answers. The ending seemed as though the writer wasn’t sure how to end it. The creation killing the creator came across as cliché. It had been many times. It was odd that after years of dealing with Nathan’s abuse Kyoko decided to put an end to it all and kill her master. Ava is assumed to have some influence of the event. But in the exchange of conversation between Ava and Kyoko, the audience is left wondering what they talked about and how could they talk if Kyoko’s voice was taken away. Another question raising awareness was why were all the A.I.s female? Since Nathan never explained why he was creating the A.I.s and sexually used Kyoko, the audience couldn’t help but question if these A.I.s were for the creation of pleasure rather than scientific discovery. Especially since Nathan built female private parts in between Ava’s legs.

Aside from the questionable story, there were a few concerns for the script. The writer of the script did not take the time and proofread the script. There were a lot of adverbs and back to back adverbs, which is practically illegal in grammar. There were a lot of telling details versus showing. Major motion scripts have to be perfectly developed and polished before even being submitted. I can only hope this script went through another round of editing and revising before being submitted to production companies.

#ExMachina #tooreal #artificialintelligence