MaryJanice Davidson: 'Ex Machina' is Ick Machina
Usually this column is about the exhausting fun of being a best-selling author juxtaposed with the exhausting fun of being a wife and mother. But occasionally I'll hate-review movies and TV, partly to warn my readers to avoid my terrible mistakes, but also because I'm a bad person.
In the past I've hate-reviewed ScarJo's Lucy, the deeply disturbing Splice and the entire fourth season of American Horror Story: Freak Show. Disclaimers: I like Scarlett Johansson. I'm normally thrilled with a deeply disturbing movie. I loved seasons one and three of American Horror Story. I'm not one of those jerks who only sees movies I know I'll hate. I'm a regular jerk.
Spoilers ahoy.
To be clear, Ex Machina didn't let me down. I let Ex Machina down. It just wasn't my kind of movie. There weren't nearly enough explosions (zero), for one thing. Though I did like the stabbings (three).
This movie didn't need to be two hours long, either. Alex Garland, who wrote the wonderful 28 Days Later, could have told us this story in an hour. But he clearly felt everyone in the audience was as much an idiot as I am. Joke's on you, Alex Garland! Most of the people watching this movie are smarter than me! Anyway. Alex Garland is a big fan of showing symbolism through paintings. Get ready to see a lot of Jackson Pollock's paint dribbles, because that's super relevant. Because if Jackson Pollock had stopped to think about what he was dribbling, he never would have dribbled a single dribble! Or something.
Also, Caleb Smith, the protagonist, is a walking talking trope. He's thin and pale. He's not comfortable in his skin, or around Nathan. He's a computer programmer who lives for work and doesn't have a family. Or a girlfriend. And that is why we will now refer to him as Nerdly McGeek. Nerdly is invited to his boss' compound-in-the-wilderness, Compound So Much Weird. His boss's name is Nathan. Nathan is a jerk.
Nathan has created a robot who looks like Natalie Portman for some reason. He wants Caleb to give the Nataliebot the Turing test, except not. Seriously, they talk about the Turing test a lot and then don't give it. In the actual test, the human doesn't know he's interacting with a robot, and if he can't tell, it's passed the Turing test. But Nerdly knows from the get-go that Nataliebot is a bot. So it's more to see if, despite being an android, she experiences human emotions.
(I'll save you the suspense: She does. With a vengeance. Sorry, I keep wishing this thing had been an action movie.)
There's also Kyoko, a silent Japanese woman who is Nathan's assistant and makes delectable-looking sushi.
Nerdly McGeek starts to fall for Nataliebot. She warns him Nathan can't be trusted, because Nathan is a jerk. She's right. The Nataliebot isn't Nathan's first attempt; he's made lots of others. They all hated him. The Nataliebot isn't fond of him, either. Turns out Nathan isn't just pumping out AI androids for the technological challenge; they're also his personal sexbot platoon, including Kyoko. There's also dancing. Disco dancing. And the power goes out all the time, and when it's out everybody's room locks and the cameras go offline. And the Nataliebot starts to fall for Nerdly, because he's not a jerk.
One of the things I found most disturbing was the director's choice of actresses. Almost all the sexbots are small-boned, tiny women with no breasts to speak of and a tiny strip of pubic hair. I didn't mind that the Kyoko sexbot was built like that — she's the first one we see naked — but it was weird to see allll the sexbots, despite being different races and heights, were modeled on the exact same body type.
I don't know if the director made those choices to emphasize Nathan's jerkiness, or if it was a coincidence, or if I'm reading too much into it. With one exception (the African-American sexbot, whom we saw for about 2.5 seconds), all the sexbots had tiny bodies even if they were taller than Nathan: teeny boobs, waists that made a loaf of bread look wide, the narrowest strip of pubic hair. What was the point? Other than to make the audience wish there were explosions? Or a knife fight? (That might have been just me.)
Right, the knife fight: Nerdly realizes Nathan is going to "kill" Natalie when he upgrades her into Nataliebot 2.0, and he agrees to help her escape. They can plot because she can make a power outage at will ("Something something my battery system blah charging blah-blah."). He tells her to kill the power at 10; he'll redo the security program so instead of the doors locking when the power fizzles, they'll unlock. And away they'll go.
Except not: Nathan put in a battery-operated camera so he's been watching their private chats, because he's a jerk. He explains his jerkiness to Nerdly, who feels like a sucker and, well, he should, and now his name is Sucker Nerdly III. Just as Nataliebot warned Sucker about Nathan, so Nathan warns Sucker about Nataliebot: She's using him to escape. She doesn't have a crush on him. She is not to be messed with. Then the power goes out, because it's 10, and the movie finally gets interesting.
Sucker tells Nathan they're about to find out who loves whom, because he redid the security programming the night before, when Nathan was passed out. (When Nathan isn't raping one of his sexbots, he drinks vodka and talks about the Turing test until he passes out. Sucker used Nathan's key card to poke around in forbidden areas of Compound So Much Weird.) Nathan's horrified to see Nataliebot calmly walk out of her room, knocks Sucker unconscious, grabs a sturdy metal bar, and heads out to lasso his wayward, willful sexbot.
Nataliebot and Kyoko meet and gaze meaningfully at each other for, subjectively speaking, nine or 10 hours. Nathan spots them and commands the Nataliebot to go back to her room. Nataliebot declines. They fight. She has the upper hand until she doesn't (Nathan's a lifter, short but powerful, like a jerky tree stump.), and he shatters her arm with the bar, then starts to drag her back to her room.
He gets stabbed in the back by Kyoko. To say he's startled is a hilarious understatement. He fights Kyoko, but now has to deal with Nataliebot stabbing him. This genius who is so brilliant he created a form of intelligent life keeps forgetting he's fighting two robots. He keeps presenting his back to one in order to deal with the other, and dies. Kyoko's disabled, but Nataliebot is fine except for her broken arm. She goes to Nathan's office, passing a painting of a woman in a white dress, where Sucker is regaining consciousness.
Nataliebot asks Sucker to stay put while she fixes her broken arm by switching it out with another sexbot's. That's another thing, all the rejected sexbots are kept in Nathan's room. Not in a lab. In his room. All of them. Ick-ick-ick!
Nataliebot, arm all better, stares at her naked self in the mirror and takes 20 minutes to put skin on from other sexbots. Then she changes into a white dress (like the white dress in the painting! Whoa!), passes the painting of the woman in a white dress again (whoa!), and leaves him behind.
Sucker realizes what she's up to and gets to the door just as it clicks shut. Nataliebot of the virginal white dress has left Sucker locked in a room he can't escape (the compound is designed to contain androids who are stronger and faster than humans). There's bottled water, but no food. The security system won't let him out. The place is isolated since Nathan was a famous wealthy recluse and a jerk. No one will find Sucker before he starves to death.
Nataliebot meets the helicopter that was supposed to take Sucker back to civilization. She talks to the pilot, but we can't hear the conversation, and they fly away.
"'Sure, strange lady I've never seen in the middle of nowhere. I'm supposed to take Sucker, but I'll take you instead,'" I whispered to my husband.
"She passed the Turing test," he whispered back. "The pilot didn't know she was an A.I."
"Ohhh! I get it." (I didn't get it.)
The end. Yep. That's it.
MaryJanice Davidson is the international bestselling author of several books, including the Betsy the Vampire Queen series. She has published books, novellas, articles, short stories, recipes, movie reviews and rants. Readers can contact her at contactmjd@comcast.net, find her on Facebook, Twitter (@MaryJaniceD) and her blog. She lives in St. Paul, Minn., and has been sentenced to a husband, two teenagers and two dogs.