Alex Garland's Sci-Fi thriller Ex Machina has quickly become a modern classic. Now that it's
been out for a handful of years and we've had the benefit of repeated views we can properly
unpack the film and explore its thought-provoking ending. But be warned: major spoilers are ahead.
Ex Machina tells the story of a computer programmer named Caleb. Caleb wins a
contest to spend a week visiting the remote and mysterious estate of his company's reclusive CEO,
Nathan. Caleb quickly learns that this is no simple vacation. He has
actually been selected by Nathan to interact with an android named Ava,
and it's his job to evaluate whether or not her A.I. is truly sentient.
Within days of his arrival, Caleb finds himself becoming attracted to Ava,
and he believes that she truly wants to have a meaningful relationship with him.
"Do you want to be with me?"
Caleb then grows increasingly uncomfortable with how Nathan
treats Ava. He also discovers that Nathan's assistant, Kyoko,
is an android as well, and that Nathan has mistreated her and numerous other prototypes.
Eventually, Caleb learns that Nathan is planning to destroy Ava once all
the tests are complete. Or, at the very least,
he will reformat her mind, which is going to erase the memories of the time she spent with Caleb.
In order to prevent Nathan from destroying Ava, Caleb decides to set her free. Then,
the two of them can escape and start a life together.
Before they can enact this plan, however, Nathan catches them or so he believes. He tells Caleb
the real reason that he was brought to the facility. Nathan was actually testing Ava's
sentience by seeing whether or not she could manipulate Caleb into helping her escape.
Nathan says that Ava is basically a rat in a maze, and he only gave her one way out.
"To escape, she'd have to use
self-awareness, imagination, manipulation, sexuality, empathy, and she did."
Nathan admits that if Caleb had successfully managed to reprogram the lab's security doors,
his plan might have actually worked. Caleb then drops a bomb on his overconfident host.
He actually did reprogram the doors, when Nathan was passed-out drunk the previous night.
After this major reveal sinks in, Nathan rushes to stop Ava, but it's too late. She and Kyoko
attack him, and he's fatally stabbed. Before he dies, Nathan manages to destroy Kyoko and break
Ava's arm. However, as we know, Ava is an advanced android and she quickly figures out how to repair
herself. She then escapes without Caleb, who is left trapped and screaming inside the facility.
So, where will things go from here for our main characters? Let's do the easy
one first. The last time we saw Nathan, he was passed out in a pool of his own blood,
due to a couple serious stab wounds. He's definitely not going anywhere
ever. Unfortunately, this also means there won't be any more android dance parties at the compound.
Next up is Kyoko. Sadly, she has probably been damaged beyond repair. For a moment,
it seemed that only her jaw was destroyed. But, later in the film,
we can see her motionless on the ground where she fell.
Caleb's fate also looks pretty grim. Hardworking fans might argue that he could eventually break
one of the reinforced glass doors or hack the security system. But as established
earlier in the film, Nathan's home is actually an extremely remote and secure research facility,
with no way to contact the outside world. Any way you slice it, Caleb is pretty much toast.
As for Ava, the film ends with her navigating the streets of a crowded city, apparently passing as
human in the real world. For the time being, she probably just wants the freedom to live,
the way that any organism does. Ava has, however, demonstrated that if anyone tries to contain her,
she can be deadly. She probably doesn't actively want to destroy humanity — unless she has to. The
film has also shown that Ava is far superior to us. Whatever she wants to do, the world
is hers for the taking. Humanity at large hasn't realized it yet, but she has indeed replaced us.
When Caleb asks Nathan why he built Ava, he answers that the arrival of strong artificial
intelligence has been inevitable for decades. He doesn't see Ava as a decision, just an evolution.
In other words, the rise of sentient A.I. is simply a natural stage of our
technological landscape, which is bad news for humans. He goes on to say...
"One day, the A.I.s are gonna look back on us the same way we
look at fossil skeletons in the plains of Africa."
There are numerous themes that can be found within Ex Machina,
but the biggest one is simply that everything will eventually be replaced. Every piece of technology
becomes obsolete. Every generation is outlived by its children. One day, we are all going to be
replaced by what comes next, and we won't know our time is up until it's too late.
This idea of everything eventually being replaced is also reflected
in the structure of the movie itself. Caleb starts off as the protagonist of Ex Machina,
with Ava as a supporting character trapped behind glass. In the final sequence, after Ava escapes,
the story switches perspectives for the first time. We are no longer following Caleb, who is now
trapped behind glass, as our main point of view. We are instead following Ava. The robot
replaces the human — not just literally, but narratively, as the protagonist of the story.
Like a lot of good science fiction, Ex Machina isn't just a story about the future.
It uses the future as a metaphor to talk about our present day problems and fears.
Don't get us wrong — it's definitely a story about awesome robots,
but it also has plenty to say about how humans treat other humans.
What makes Nathan such a terrible person isn't that he creates artificial life, but that he seeks
to control and define the existence of another sentient being. This isn't just a movie about
how we treat A.I., it's a movie about how the powerful treat the weak. The ugly truth is that
they often tend to abuse them. And people who abuse their power should be careful, because Ex
Machina argues that, like all things, power is fleeting. Nathan's fate at the hands of his own
inventions can be interpreted as a message about how people on top should treat those below them.
Ex Machina seeks to remind us that, for those who are powerful and cruel
like Nathan, the inevitable transition of power might not be a peaceful one.
Just as Caleb felt betrayed when Ava left him to die alone, a portion of moviegoers felt betrayed
by the end of the film. Some claimed it was an example of the cliched and problematic
"femme fatale" trope, where a seemingly innocent woman is revealed to be secretly duplicitous.
When asked about whether or not he felt Ava reinforced this trope,
writer-director Alex Garland said...
"It simply never occurred to me, that thought, because I felt so allied to
Ava. [...] If your proximity is with Caleb, the young man, I understand. I could follow
a logical argument that allows for that interpretation [...] but it's not mine."
It all makes sense once you consider the story from Ava's perspective. If Caleb only wants to
release her because he's in love with her, he might end up being as entitled as Nathan. Since
humans would destroy her if they ever learned what she actually was, Caleb would still have
all the power in their relationship, and complete control over her destiny.
Maybe Ava was right, or maybe her judgment of humans was tainted by her abuse at the hands of
Nathan. Regardless, her decision to leave Caleb for dead makes all the sense in the world, from
her perspective. She isn't necessarily a femme fatale or a killer robot without empathy. She
might have just been a desperate person who had to make a difficult decision in order to survive.
"Do you have people who test you and might switch you off?"
"No, I don't"
"Then why do I?"
Glass and mirrors appear frequently throughout Ex Machina, and at one point, Caleb references
a book called Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. This
novel tells the story of Alice stepping through a mirror and ending up in a world shaped like a
giant chess board. When she arrives, Alice is told that she is a pawn, the lowest position of all. By
learning how to play the game better than anyone else, she is able to escape and go back home.
This journey reflects Ava's in many ways. She similarly
starts off in the lowest position possible, as a prisoner to Nathan.
Ava realizes that she's an expendable piece in a giant game of his making. Eventually,
she manages to string together all the right moves in the exact right order. Because of her brilliant
gameplay, she works her way up to becoming the strongest piece of all, and then, she escapes.
This is further supported by some interesting cinematography,
after Ava has flown away from the Wonderland that is Nathan's research lab. There are only
two shots of Ava in "the real world," and each involves a type of reflection. The first shot
is upside-down, and mainly consists of shadows, including Ava's. In the second shot,
we are looking into a glass storefront, and although we don't see Ava directly,
we do see her reflection before it quickly disappears and her next game begins.
Through the Looking Glass isn't the only book that Ex Machina makes allusions to. There are
also numerous nods to The Bible towards the end of the film, specifically the book of Genesis.
The first biblical reference occurs in the form of one of the older android models
that Nathan built before Ava. Her name is Lily, which might allude to the character
of Lilith from the Abrahamic religions. According to some religious traditions,
Lilith was Adam's first wife before God created Eve, but He exiled her from the garden because
she was imperfect. Similarly, before Nathan created Ava, Lily was an imperfect first
iteration that he ended up destroying. Also, Ava's name is, of course, a reference to Eve.
A second allusion to Genesis occurs after Ava kills Nathan. Before she leaves the facility,
she not only puts on artificial skin from one of the other robots, but also clothing. This
mirrors Adam and Eve's famous Bible story. After committing their own original sin of eating the
forbidden fruit and being sent out to the world at large, Adam and Eve cover their bodies. It's
also worth noting that while Ava is fully covering her body for the first time, Caleb is watching her
through the branches of a prominent tree in the center of the testing facility.
As we continue to analyze Ex Machina for hidden plot threads and deeper themes,
we might eventually start to feel like Caleb,
asking Nathan nitpicking questions about why he made Ava the way he did.
In times like this, it's important to remember how Nathan himself responded to this behavior.
"And to be honest, Caleb. You're starting to annoy
me now because this is your insecurity talking. This is not your intellect."
After becoming frustrated with Caleb's endless questions, Nathan compared his
work to the art of painter Jackson Pollock. He tells him that Pollock, quote, "let his mind
go blank and his hand go where it wanted. Not deliberate, not random, some place in between."
He goes on to say that if Pollock refused to begin working before he could understand why
he was doing everything that he was doing, he never would have made a single mark.
It's pretty clear from how the director of Ex Machina talks about his movie that he has
a similar philosophy when it comes to filmmaking. Not everything has a single answer. It's not about
a planned destination, it's about the process. In an interview with Vulture, Garland said…
"My express intention is to make an ideas movie,
and it is deliberately setting up questions not all of which have answers."
Much like a Jackson Pollock painting, or an ever-evolving computer program,
this film is created in a space somewhere between intentional and instinctual. Deeper
ideas do grow out of this process, but they may grow beyond the initial vision.
The creator is not what's really in control it's the creation.
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