“Ex Machina” fails its own test

By Nicholas Barber

Films about artificial intelligence, from “Blade Runner” to “Her”, tend to pose two key questions: first, how can we prove that a machine has consciousness? And second, would a conscious machine have human rights? But once such films have posed those key questions, they usually move on to the issues they’re really interested in. First, will these machines decide to murder us all and take over the world? And second, will any of them look and sound like beautiful women? What’s disappointing about Alex Garland’s shiny new science-fiction mystery, “Ex Machina”, is that it seems genuinely fascinated by the first two questions, only to discard them in favour of the last two.

Its hero is Caleb (the likeably gangly and awkward Domhnall Gleeson), an eager young programmer who works for a Google-beating search engine. In the film’s brisk, almost dialogue-free opening sequence, Caleb wins the jackpot in a company-wide lottery, his prize being to spend a week with the reclusive CEO in his remote country retreat. Personally, I’m not sure that sleeping in your boss’s spare room for a week qualifies as a prize, particularly if he is notoriously anti-social, but Caleb is delighted, even when he is deposited by helicopter in the middle of nowhere and informed that he has to trek through the woods to find his boss’s secret lair. When he gets to the house, and meets his mysterious host, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), he is still delighted, never mind that the musclebound CEO’s shaven head and bushy beard indicate that he might not be very well adjusted. Anyway, Nathan quickly reveals the real reason for the trip. He has built a robot with artificial intelligence, he says. Caleb’s job is to subject it to the Turing Test; to judge from its conversation whether it is thinking for itself. Caleb and the robot will sit and talk, separated by a glass wall, like Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, while Nathan watches them on his monitors.