Ex Machina

A stylish, if slow-paced, variant on Frankenstein, Alex Garland's  Ex Machina  (2015) recycles motifs familiar from the old Universal horror films of the Thirties:  a mad scientist has isolated himself in a fortress-like retreat high in the mountains; there he labors to create artificial life.  The mad scientist has a skeptical apprentice and a taciturn, exotic henchman.  Ultimately, the man-made monsters go berserk, murder their creators, and escape into the world.  Ex Machina updates this formula -- the life form created by he mad scientist, a technology nerd like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, is a sexy female robot thought to embody artificial intelligence.  The skeptical young colleague is a computer programmer recruited to perform a perverse Turing test to determine if the robot-woman can pass for human -- here, the criteria for true artificial intelligence is that the robot shows the capacity to seduce her human evaluator even though her mechanical innards are disconcertingly visible.  Instead of a hunchbacked factotum, the mad scientist's henchman is a silent Japanese woman, a beautiful young geisha who is, of course, a robot herself -- however, a "basic pleasure model" like Pris in Blade Runner.  Gilbert shoots this hackneyed material as if it were innovative and significant -- his sets look like moist terrariums or interiors in an Antonioni film, everything is a slightly out of focus, and the colors are tastefully muted beiges and browns.  The dialogue is reasonably witty and the acting is fairly convincing.  The film is static, theatrical, and, almost entirely shot indoors -- the scenario has the character of a stage-play adapted for the screen.  The film is quite scary and the horror sequences in the last ten minutes are effectively staged.  But the film is irritating because it is pretentiously self-important -- the director forgets that this is just another, more sexually explicit, version of The Bride of Frankenstein, albeit longer, much less funny, and, certainly, lacking the grim beauty of the thirties film.  (The comparison is unfair:  very few films in the history of the medium are as funny, intelligent, and beautiful as The Bride of Frankenstein.)  The mad scientist keeps a collection of dead beauties suspended in closets, very much like Bela Lugosi's gallery of embalmed girls in The Black Cat -- and, as in that movie, a post-modernist mansion is significant as a character in its own right in the action on screen.  The picture is modestly thought-provoking and it yields one dividend:  the movie's subtext suggests that computer geeks become technology titans are obsessed with creating ideal robotic sexual partners as if in recompense for rejection suffered by the nerds during their high-school and college years -- a picture like this casts the unfortunate Linda Gates in an entirely new, and different, light.