Reseñas de la crítica

Much of Ex Machina's criticism has hinged on whether it's a feminist revenge parable or an objectifying robot fantasy, but both readings threaten to flatten the complexity that we, like Caleb, are asked to feel without explaining... The moment in the hallway, in its partiality and mysteriousness, has no earlier model. Amid all the film's unmaskings and sexual clichés, this, the mutual recognition between Ava and Kyoko, is the film's greatest accomplishment: the true singularity.

Elongating 25 minutes worth of story with the help of some heavy robo-petting and Oscar Isaac's technologist speechifying, Garland takes some old Twilight Zone tropes for a spin. But that déjà vu is precisely the point. Like Steve Jobs channeling Rod Serling, that familiarity is why EX MACHINA gets under our skin.

Women's captivity is the great theme of most of 2015's Oscar-nominated films, and Ex Machina is the most basic and manipulative of these, the tale of a hapless john sent on a bizarre mission by a pimp to see if he can free his whore. The sordidness is made oblique because the characters are a programmer, a genius CEO, and a pixie android, and it's set in a sterile underground lab.

I spoke about this picture with a filmmaker friend of mine and we both expressed a kind of irritated mystification about it: how did Alex Garland, an experienced novelist and screenwriter, become such a goddamn good director his first time out? It's kind of maddening.

Novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland's brainy, precisely calibrated chamber drama was that rare piece of contemporary sci-fi filmmaking worthy of mention in the same breath as "Blade Runner" and "The Terminator." Whatever this modestly scaled film lacked in budgetary heft, it more than made up for in sleekly expressive production design, provocative ideas about the fine line between man and machine, and knockout performances from Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander.

Among the many pleasures I found in the smartness of Alex Garland's Ex Machina were its complex set of responses to other SF films (not to mention Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which it provides with a thoughtful sex change): most clearly Solaris(including even the use of a Jackson Pollock canvas to "reply" to Tarkovsky's employment of Brueghel's "Hunters in the Snow"), but perhaps also John Boorman's Zardoz (1974) in a few aspects of its production design and its periodic rape fantasies.

Written and directed by Alex Garland (a novelist and screenwriter), it is a first feature: extraordinary, considering the authority the film carries. There are no first-time jitters in evidence. No grabbing-for-the-brass-ring and showing the strain, common of first-timers. Garland knows exactly what he is doing, what story he is telling, and how he wants to tell it.

If our technological self-distraction constitutes the gradual loss of our humanity, Ava—Eve 2.0—is a return to it. If that's right, she signifies the end of an evolution of smart-but-dumb gadgets that make us ever more robotic, in robots whose sense of emotional vitality is heightened to the utmost. As such, they serve as surrogate mothers to the emotional life that humanity has given up, worthy vessels for carrying on the project of consciousness.

All this is sleekly done and amusingly provocative: unlike Her, Ex Machina has a literary awareness, evident in its allusions to Genesis, Prometheus, and other mythic predecessors, that enriches the familiar narrative.

Ex Machina is not a Luddite parable, but rather an examination of the myopia of power, even among those who, like Caleb, would see themselves as powerless. As such, Ava and Caleb operate as each other's narrative opposites. Where she dreams in color, he dreams in black and white. And when he retreats into the basement at the end of the film, she exits triumphantly, leaving Caleb a final message — "REJECTED" — negating his offer of affection delivered from a position of power.

Garland was wise to set ninety percent of the film in one location, as it gives him a highly controlled environment, and the camerawork feels purposeful and precise. The film's clean, sparse aesthetic matches its minimalist narrative, which hinges on just three characters. This means, of course, that the performances of Vikander, Gleeson, and Isaac are crucial.

Ex Machina is primarily a three-hander, a small-scale contest of wills that would be well-suited to the stage were it not so dependent on the massive, imposing architecture for its primary effects. In this regard there is a schematic quality to Ex Machina... Nonetheless, the icy visual abstraction is impressive. That, along with a soundtrack by Portishead's Geoff Barrow, serves to make Ex Machina a worthwhile curiosity, even if it ultimately has less in its mental banks than it thinks it does.