10 Years Ago, A Stunning AI Thriller Announced A New Sci-Fi Talent

From Blade Runner and A.I. to Short Circuit and the universally beloved D.A.R.Y.L., science fiction has long poked and prodded at the theoretical line separating sentient beings from artificial creations only capable of producing the illusion of sentience. These stories usually end in triumph, or at least vindication, for whatever robot, cyborg, or android is on metaphysical trial, whether it’s Data earning legal rights in Star Trek’s classic “The Measure of a Man,” Roy Batty forcing the world to acknowledge him, or Daryl doing what Daryl does.

It’s a classic genre story, but 10 years ago, Ex Machina used it to pull a sneaky trick. The directorial debut of novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland, then most famous for writing 28 Days Later, Ex Machina is a simple but unnervingly effective thriller that’s retained its relevance as an alliance of lazy college students and easily bewildered legacy media columnists rush to deify ChatGPT.

Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a code jockey at tech behemoth Blue Book, wins a raffle to spend a week at the remote home of reclusive CEO Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). Upon arrival, Caleb learns this is more than a social visit; Nathan’s invented an intelligent robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander), and wants Caleb’s help in determining if she passes the Turing Test. Throw in the out-of-left-field dance scene and it’s basically M3gan For B0ys.

Set almost entirely within the confines of Nathan’s ultra-modern home and lab, and featuring almost no one else but Nathan’s chef and maid, the silent Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), Ex Machina is a sparse, isolating experience. You don’t think much of Nathan’s removal from civilization at first — of course a tech zillionaire owns an expensive house in the middle of nowhere — but by the time things go off the rails, you’ll have a greater appreciation for your neighbors.

Nathan’s clearly hiding something. He gets a mean streak after his nightly boozefests, he gleefully informs Caleb that Ava is equipped for romance, and his compound keeps suffering mysterious power cuts. Caleb, for his part, seems a bit too enthused by Ava, but at first, they’re both happy to debate what elevates a machine from product to person as Caleb puts Ava through her conversational paces.

Garland’s writing talents and Isaac’s charisma keep Ex Machina’s philosophical tangents from becoming self-indulgent, but despite their thoughtfulness, they might strike the genre-savvy viewer as a little unnecessary. We’ve all seen a robot movie before, so Ava is obviously going to pass her test. It feels like the real story is revealed when she warns Caleb that Nathan is lying to him, and that she’s causing the power outages so they can speak without being monitored.

But Ex Machina has bigger tricks up its sleeves. You should witness them for yourself, but as a refresher for the experienced, the movie’s slow burn is abruptly doused with fuel. Ava and Caleb establish a flirtatious rapport, and Caleb agrees to help Ava escape after discovering she’s just the latest in a line of models Nathan has destroyed and improved upon. But Nathan appears to foil them when he reveals that Caleb wasn’t really invited to offer his thoughts on Ava’s intelligence. Ava, Nathan reasoned, already passed for sentient in conversation; the real test was whether she could trick a lonely, impressionable young schmuck into helping her escape captivity.

To Nathan, the real test of mind is whether you’re capable of manipulating someone into serving your own needs, logic befitting an arrogant man who thinks he invented AI and promptly decided to use it as a sex toy. But despite his precautions, the escape attempt happens anyway. One knife fight later and Nathan is dead, and then the once personable Ava leaves Caleb locked up to starve without sparing him so much as a backward glance. Did she pass Nathan’s test? Or was she just following her programming?

It’s an ambiguous ending that seems to admonish Nathan and Caleb for all their philosophical grandstanding. We know other people are sentient because we’re sentient, and unless you’re a full-blown solipsist, that’s enough to assume other people have minds of their own. But we can’t apply that same logic to a machine, no matter how much it impresses us. And by the end of Ex Machina, we still have no idea if any of Ava’s feelings were real, or if she even feels anything at all.

Arguments have been made that a computer, no matter how high-tech it gets, can never have a mind: executing increasingly complicated programming would never be the same as thinking about it. That’s not the only conclusion you can take away from Ex Machina, but it’s one worth reflecting on as Sam Altman and his ilk continue to insist they’re building digital gods, not SmarterChild’s offspring. Today’s chatbots probably won’t murder you, but there are people out there right now making Caleb’s mistake, believing their phone is empathizing with them because you can make it say it’s sad.

Regardless of how you read it, Ex Machina flipped the script on one of sci-fi’s oldest conceits. As viewers, we’re almost always Caleb, rooting for Data or David or beloved Daryl as we come to understand and sympathize with them. Ex Machina invited us to understand Ava too, only to realize that in the end, we actually understood nothing.