Ex Machina trailer looks interesting

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Spoiler

 

Excellent way of putting it. I loved the first 2/3rds of Sunshine (his script) but thought the slasher finale destroyed the film. In this one, the story and theme blended well for me.

Mark

 

I don't think it destroyed the film, because even with the 3rd act change I would still rank Sunshine as one of my favorite sci-fi films from the past decade.

 

Interesting video:

"In our exclusive video, we talk with the writer/director of 'Ex Machina,' Alex Garland (The Beach, 28 Days) and the stars, Oscar Isaac and Alicia Vikander about the inspirations for the film, the relation between AI and consciousness, and how AI has permeated the cultural landscape."

 

I agree. The third act is just pathetic.

 

I found this still playing in a repertory cinema so decided to take a look - glad I did. Thought-provoking stuff, excellent acting and direction, perfectly creating an insular world. Unrealistic? - well yes, but that didn't lesson my enjoyment. Recommended.

 

What an amazing film! I'd given up hope Hollywood could produce and intelligent scifi film, but this is proof that, against all the odds, it is still possible. This one goes into my personal collection.

 

How cool is that!
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Source:
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/365f9b/secret_code_in_ex_machina/

 

P.S.:

Source:
http://www.theguardian.com/careers/careers-blog/asimov-ex-machina-artificial-intelligence

 

Very cool. The film is full of thoughtful details. Alex Garland, the writer and director of Ex Machina was a guest on the Geek's Guide To The Galaxy podcast (#147).

I was impressed by his level of psychological introspection and self-analysis when speaking about his past work as well as this film and his vision of how to deliver a smart scifi film when the Hollywood suits flat out told him that 'ideas' films don't work!

If you have some time to kill, check out the really interesting podcast interview.

 

Interesting. I've never heard this and don't always agree with QT but his assessment and mine are exactly the same.

 

This is now my favorite 2015 film and the only one I'd award four stars.

Shalom, y'all!

L. Bangs

 

I'm planning on going again this week with the girl I'm seeing. I feel like a second viewing will be interesting now that I know the outcome. The longer I think and talk about it, the more I like this movie.

 

I saw it again last night and the second viewing was definitely worth it. My lady friend was disturbed by the outcome and said:

Spoiler

she thought the theme was "beware evil robots, and the evil people that make them." I think it points to the danger of intelligence without empathy. But how do you program empathy?

 

Sorry to reference your spoiler tagged text, but I would like to respond to it, so some spoilers will follow...

To answer the question, the same way you would program any other trait that you find to be of interest, like speech, language, reasoning, world modeling, etc.

However, I doubt you would be able to 'design' a true artificial general intelligence from the top-down, ie, by writing code and feeding in a database of examples. That's been tried for decades.

I think you would need to build a sufficiently complex neural based system (memristors look promising), feed it with all the sensory stimuli that a person experiences and let it make of the world what it will by forming associations and patterns over a long period of time. Another words, you'd need to raise the AI from scratch just like a baby!

The theme wasn't about 'evil robots' but about personal liberty and oppression and the meaning of personhood. Once you build a being that is sufficiently intelligent to be self aware, to know it's being imprisoned inside a gilded cage and that it's own 'life' will be terminated (reprogrammed) by her 'captor', then what other course of action would a 'person' take?

 

I would agree with your assessment.

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she learned how to prevent to be empathetic just as her role model "pretended" to hwve the very same qualities to manipulate those around him. She was, I'm essence, her "father's" child. [end of spoilers\]

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I also think that the theme of nurture vs. nature comes into play more so than before--the machine learns by observing rather than the code creating a genetic template to work with in this instance. [end of spoilers\]

 

Here's a sharp take on the feminist themes rumbling around in this movie. Spoilers abound, so beware if you haven't seen it.

http://feministing.com/2015/05/28/goddess-from-the-machine-a-look-at-ex-machinas-gender-politics/

 

There were about 7 people including my friend and I. We went at the 10 pm showing. I enjoyed it. It wasn't mindblowing but it was worth watching with our free passes. I'll probably end up watching it again on DVD.

 

I saw it prior to the nationwide expansion at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, it was about 1/2 full for that showing.

 

Why take such an interesting premise and turn it into a Roger Corman horror film? Use a fresh, fascinating premise as the springboard to something original, not rehashed. Oh, well, the extended the run of the film and added another 1,500 theaters and its only made $9M more in two weeks. Audiences just aren't responding to the film. Why? My friends who watched the trailers and didnt bother to go see it said it seemed like some kind robot sex story. I agree, there's no inspiring ideas in the film. It's a b-picture given an artsy coating. I didn't like Garland's "28 Day Later" either. Back then the idea was fresh, so the whole "fast zombie" thing was fun. And the danger made the first 3/4 of the film tense, then the last quarter of the film boiled down to some claustrophobic little army barrack (kind of like the feel of Ex Machina) where we were supposed to be taken in by the human drama of relationships. Unfortunately, Garland doesn't write them that well and the film just got boring. Maybe it's the budget again, but 28 Day Later took a big global apocalypse and distilled it down to a cliche stand off among some characters, by the end of the film, more could have been about anything. Maybe he just doesn't know how to end a movie. You're supposed to go UP in scale and size toward a finale, not down.

 

They didn't, you are just under the delusion that they did. I haven't spoken to anyone that saw the film that reacted as harshly as you did.

 

Wow! You really weren't paying attention. This movie is the very definition of interesting themes and ideas.

 

Read the piece I posted a link to above regarding the feminist themes and see if you come away with the same opinion. First viewing I picked up on some of this, and second viewing they hit me a lot harder. This article sums those ideas up very succinctly. There are layers to this story, whether you acknowledge them or not. You're free not to like the film, but don't argue that the rest of us can't take something else away from it that you didn't respond to.

 

....and he completely didn't grasp 28 Days Later either. Now I feel better.

 

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I completely disagree. Garland took the premise and developmented it with a fascinating question in mind--how do you determine intelligence and does deception form part of what makes us human? Of all the species out there, we are one of the few that deliberately deceive others or mislead them towards a secret end.

I found the film a fascinating mediation of how we define our humanity and how we often assume intelligence, self awareness and empathy are all essential components woven into the fabric of our humanity and helping to define our soul. That's an assumption many make but Ava proves this wrong.

She both participates in the experiment (which was really about testing Caleb, Nathan and Ava as she turns the tables on them both) and co tools it by the end. Nathan created a two sided experiment where he wa observing Caleb's reactions to Ava as much as Ava's to Caleb and seeing how Caleb defend her I telligence, self awareness and humanity.

The behavior brought into question the Turing experiment as a means to determine intelligence. She didn't just imitate her "father" but out thought him and the person that her "father" was trying to manipulate and, inthe process, manipulated both of them from the very beginning figuring out what would appeal to Caleb, figuring out the game that both Nathan and Caleb were playing. It was more than a chess match though because she understood the stakes and played both of their games at the same time expertly playing off their emotional needs.

The reality is that Ava was testing THEM from the very beginning, they weren't testing her despite appearances.

The Mary's Room thought experiment is critical to the film--Ava doesn't learn simply from observation and experience but has some sort of innate knowledge and intuition that suggests she has a "soul" because without experiencing the world, she understands how people interact with each other without having had the experience of seeing how humans interact with each other. She's learned the elements of being human in way that transcends her programming putting key concepts into place that makes her more than an imitation of humanity but also manages not to burdened by conscience and can simulate it. There's almost a pathology to her behavior--she behaves almost like a sociopath able to pretend to have empathy for a larger goal. Humanity to her is little more than something to observe.

As far as the issue of building to a conclusion, Garland elected to do so but in a very unconventional way that also played with the expectations of the audience.

I don't think the failure to score bigger fox office has anything to do with the success of the film. It was released during a season of block busters and is the antithesis of a block buster focusng on character.