“There’s a new movie called Ex Machina whose message can be summed up as ‘don’t fall in love with a robot,'” John Podhoretz writes in the Weekly Standard:
Nobody actually calls Ava, the titular machina of Ex Machina, a robot. That would not be cool, and the film’s writer-director Alex Garland wants Ex Machina to be cool, above all things. All but the opening two minutes and the final 30 seconds are set in a spectacular underground mansion that’s part Bond-villain lair, part Apple Store. (It was filmed at a resort in Norway that you’ve probably already toured from your couch during a World’s Hottest Hotels special on the Travel Channel.) She is the construct of a billionaire who is half Zuckerberg and half Jobs, an oddly sybaritic recluse played by the wonderful Oscar Isaac. He refers to Ava solely as an “A.I.,” because those two letters are cooler than Capek’s original five letters, and these days you can buy a robot with free shipping from Amazon Prime that looks like the 1970s memory game Simon and will attempt and fail to vacuum your floors. Who would want to spoon with a Roomba anyway?
But you can’t fool me. This A.I. may have a glowing translucent brain, but she’s also got titanium arms, things whirr and click when she moves, and she’s drop-dead gorgeous, so of course she’s a robot. She is played by the Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, who will be in five other major movies this year, which is not surprising, because she speaks English beautifully and as a visual object she’s practically perfect in every way.
And this brings up the other thing. Let’s face it, the whole female-robot scenario is a deeply disturbing one, since it’s basically a creepy wish fulfillment about a woman with no personality who will do everything and anything a man tells her to.
Didn’t we all see this movie 30 years ago?
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