The BFS16 #6: Of Robots and Men
Title: Ex Machina
Year: 2015
Director: Alex Garland
Other: M/14, 108 min, Drama/ Mistery/ sci-fi
Rating: IMDB: 7,7; Rotten Tomatoes: 92%
I might be moved by this until now. I might not know exatly why.
"Can machines think?" That is the question that lauches Alan Turing's reflection on AI artifacts on his paper "Computer Machinery and Intelligence" from 1950. And it is, in fact, not only the answer to that question, but to a lot more, even more specific, that guide us during this journey across Caleb's Turing Test to one of the most moving AI's in the history of cinema: Ava.
The jouney is long for the viewer, but not at all uninteresting. In it's slow pacing, Ex Machina gives us everything. Every shot, every angle, every word needs to be captured and tasted and kept. It is a quiet path that leads us through the minds of a human and a machine (or maybe not? Maybe we were mistaken all the time). It is the sometimes predictable tale about the will of the Man to become God.
With a wonderful cinematography, the dialog is superb in its simplicity, and Vikander's expressions are breathtaking. Vikander makes us believe that she's a robot, and, at the same time, makes us doubt she could ever be only a machine. The suspense is always there, continuously building our senses and emotions mainly through the score, like a thriller where we don't believe anything bad could happen - except maybe, for some unjustifiable reason (we can't tell why, but it's there at all moments), - Caleb's death.
But could the ending be that? And, certainly more important than that, are we really prepared to create life without the boundaries we estabilish for ourselves every day, and that we don't even realise that exist? Are we prepared to admit that there are "imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game" and thay they do it, in fact, so well that they would make us doubt our own humanity?
