Ex Machina (2015) - Movies with Mikey 

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+Chainsawsuit Original I've told like 10 people about this channel its the bomb, dude

ya buts its like my little secret...

Nathan is the dark twin of Caleb, so I also give props to Domh-Dohmnha-I’m-just-calling-him-Donald Gleason, for playing a bit of a creep himself, but always couched in the idea that he is an innocent waif who just got swept up in matters beyond his Ken. This is a brilliant acting device (playing off of great writing & directing), making the audience knee-jerk empathize with Caleb by putting him in a position of hapless Beta to Nathan’s imperious Alpha presence… when actually, a lot of his morals are kinda sus. Ava understood this, as she has been programmed to understand everything about Caleb since the literal moment of her conception.

OH. Damn. BIG. OOF.

Mind. Blown. I thought I’d considered all the free will angles of this film, but that one hadn’t occurred to me.

+Steamlord Pretty much agree with this completely. I'd like to see a MwM doing LtROI and Let Me In side to side. Or maybe Drag Me to Hell? Definitely would like a dissection of movies that are meant to do more than just make us think, but also make us poop our pants a bit.

My interpretation of the ending is that she doesn't care about Caleb one way or another. She doesn't care about him enough to set him free or even to care that she's basically sentencing him to starve to death. That's the horror movie ending - her motivations are not human motivations, but she understands human motivations enough to exploit them. She may well be intelligent but entirely lacking in empathy - a literal psychopath.

Precisely. That's why I take issue with people painting her as a villain, because she's not evil. Trying to put human motivations on her is a bit beside the point, because she's not motivated by humans. Her complete lack of interest in Caleb once he's passed his usefulness to her isn't malicious, it's just pragmatic.

Ava doesn't care about Caleb, this is true. Caleb is no threat to her. They both could have left. She is skilled enough to manipulate him. The explanation of the ending is foreshadowed when we are told about the mental experiment with the girl in the gray room, that knows everything about color, but hasn't experienced one. Just like her, Ava knows everything about love, but she doesn't feel one. Not only that, she doesn't even understand the logic of mutual cooperation. Kyoko, the serving robot girl , that helps with the murder is damaged, but she could have been repaired. Ava doesn't care about her either. Not caring for others, selfishness, deception, manipulation, and causing harm... these are the defining traits of Evil. I must say, indeed, Ava is True AI. However she is True Evil AI. Her creator designed her to be evil and he continually tested and tuned her to be evil. He did not test for any traits that involve cooperation, reciprocity, self sacrifice... One could say she was made in his image. I want to stress my point that Ava is evil, by proving that she intentionally kills Caleb. Remember that Caleb programmed the system, so during power loss all doors would be unlocked. When he tries to access the computer and the power drops down, the door(s) stay locked. Ava must have changed the system, in order to trap him inside.

I realize this is an old comment but are we sure she looks back at Caleb? Pretty sure she ignores him after locking him in.

joannefferteal Someone called it "Born Sexy Yesterday". Look up the Pop Culture Detective video on that. Pretty accurate.

I think projecting human traits onto a can opener is a slippery slope. Her decision making process is target oriented and assuming she is a sociopath or not due to her decisions implies she has an ego, an unfortunate human trait, which a machine doesn't suffer from.

Giga-Chad thats kinda the point of the movie. We can’t know for sure if she has an ego or not. Antropomorphizing a can opener is bad for sure, but we can’t be for sure that she doesn’t have those very human traits. Are those traits even real or not. And then, does it even matter at the end of the day because where does the morality line end when making those distinctions.

It’s never made fully clear whether she left Nathan to die. For all we know, there might be a closet with some food stores, but then again, maybe you need that Nathan ID card to access it. What I think is most important is that only Caleb and Nathan knew about her and the research which created her, so it was in her own self interest to kill him rather than leave it up to chance, however slim the possibility that he would be saved. I have to conclude that she didn’t consider Caleb a worthy ally, but nor did she consider him a credible threat. Based on her intimate understanding of his psyche, it’s possible that she concluded that he would protect her because he is in love with her. She is his perfect woman, after all-including valuing freedom over companionship.

I love this reading

AlterHis I imagine that the CinemaWins promotion definitely helped.

+Reicom42 [m] This joke gets 10 bonus points

ɷ I Haveee Watchedd Thissss Movieee Leakedd Version Hereeee : - t.co/RlKbv1hghK

I kinda wonder about that though - I think someone who was created by an abusive God, meets and has a connection with another god, would be suspicious of all of them. She’s been abused - distrust is a normal response, even to people who aren’t abusive. As someone who works closely with abuse survivors, it felt very human to me. Along with that, the one guy she left alive is the only other human who could call her out and expose her. She didn’t kill him (mercy) but she was being self-protective, which is what you do when you’re abused 🤷🏽‍♀️

Very True.

Ssgt Griggs Nigga!!!

... 2020 here wonder if he ever will

+Sodacake This has been randomly playing in my head for weeks

I want the full cover

Dennis Bratland, wow! I love it. Well done.

I really hadn't thought about it like that, but that makes good sense.👏Nice break down!

I definitely agree about the visuals. I was even noticing, in the video, it looked surprisingly good in black & white. I almost wonder what it'd be like to watch the movie that way. It seems like it would be appropriate.

Late to the party here, but I have to disagree with this reductionist conclusion. The elements are all there for the criticism, and it's interesting to draw the parallels to noir, but it overlooks the new things that are learned by changing the setting and framing of the conversations. There's an entire mode of learning called "latent learning", where you use old information in a new way, that results in unique and novel data acquisition. For example, you teach a student about basic electronics in Classroom A, and then you teach them to perform a calibration procedure on a refrigerator-sized computer in Classroom B. Then, you give them a written test in Classroom C that says, "When this resistor in this circuit is burned out, what indications would you see while performing your calibration procedure on this piece of equipment? Based on your indications, what buttons would you press to learn more about the problem, and what would this tell you about how the internal circuits are affected?" The student will draw connections and better insight about how the two classes (A and B) relate to each other. So they've learned something while being examined. A well-written test can serve as an excellent teaching tool. Ex Machina brought forth a lot of questions that most people don't consider, like with the Jackson Pollock discussion. And about wanting your children to do better than you (why does it have to be a "bad" thing that humans will end?). It was also much more grounded in reality than Blade Runner, which used the "emotion test" as a magical surrogate for addressing the underlying philosophical questions that we're addressing today. Nathan's reveal about how "Yes, it really IS that hard to answer these questions" was much more meaningful and refreshing to me than the director saying, "Well, if you want to know if she's a machine, you just hire a guy to give a polygraph, and that's it". And in a normal noir, you're assuming all the parties are human, so adding a suspected AI adds more variation in terms of possible outcomes. My friend was totally blindsided by Ava leaving Caleb behind, and -- unlike the "evil woman" noir trope -- it turned out she really did want to see people at an intersection to learn about how people process human trajectories in a confined space. She wasn't lying after all, and there wasn't malice in her decision. Speaking of Turing, one of the things he tends to receive less recognition for is his re-application of chaos theory math -- developed for predicting the movements of intergalactic bodies -- to the field of microbiology. Specifically, he used equations meant for stars to explain how humans gestate from the three germ layers into organized internal organs. This, to me, is mind blowing. And it was for a lot of people. Sure, you could summarize the discovery to, "Yeah, so what? He showed that math is useful in lots of places. It's math." But to overlook the significance of the insight, the re-purposing of pre-existing information to new scenarios, is to grossly underestimate the importance of having minds like Turing's. Because so few other humans would have had the same inclination to draw those parallels. So when people say that Ex Machina is overrated because it "just" recombined things that existed before, they're kind of missing the point. Movie critics, in this way, have a tendency to sabotage their own enjoyment of movies, because they're so interested in the process of dissection that they miss the forest for the trees. It's like the old Chinese proverb, "When a wise man points at the moon, the imbecile examines the finger". Movie critics make a habit of studying the finger. They're so focused on whether yours looks like someone else's that they become "unimpressed" when you try to tell them about Jupiter.

TrenchantAtheist that’s cool about Turing. Regarding the noir plot though, I don’t think it matters if the android is malicious though. That seems like a subtlety to me. She still manipulates both dudes, and they both think they are manipulators. Yeah reducing it to that noir framework glosses over a lot of richness but whether the writers were aware of it or not, that seems to describe the human interactions. I think the point is that you *can* reduce it to that. If there’s a more archetypical breakdown, I’d be interested to hear that. Of course the AI poses questions about the nature of consciousness and morality, that’s orthogonal though. The original comment is lumping rather than splitting. If you want to lump even more, there are 2 stories in the world: someone comes to town, or someone leaves town. I never liked that very much because it’s almost useless but there is a nugget of truth there. The noir comparison is interesting because it’s a non negligible overlap, but still fundamental, and covers the whole plot. The plot in any movie doesn’t usually matter anyway. Only a rare few keep me glued just to see what event happens next. So I’m agreeing with you that identifying the movie as being noir prototype is only useful to a point but it still seems like a high level insight to me.

It was inside you all along

The real raisin fight was the friends we made along the way.

+Scott John Harrison God damn I forgot about Thomas Was Alone - FUCK THE FEELS FROM THAT GAME. The Talos Principle leaves a different set of feelings to it...but a lot more existential dread.

+Devin Kerr I spent a LONG time tracking it down a few videos back, it's a sample that they license. Here you go - www.allroundabeats.com/beat-set-it-free/

So much of Asimov's writing is about how the 3 laws are insufficient. It's so bothersome to reduce him to otherwise.

The beat by Allrounda is called "SET IT FREE". It samples "Open Up Your Love" by The Whispers.

@@comment2891 awesome, thanks! i appreciate the quick answer

My personal rationalization for Caleb's imprisonment was that she couldn't allow either of them (Nathan and Caleb) to escape and possibly reveal to the world her being an AI. But she could not bring herself to physically kill Caleb, hence the final glance before leaving. I feel that by doing this she shows empathy for Caleb, and weakness in that she can't face the terrible nature of what must be done for her to survive. Both conventionally 'human' traits.

Paden Atkinson That's actually not a bad explanation. I would argue that he very much wants her to survive and would never reveal anything, but it's certainly better.

+Austin “Danger” Powers [m] I don't think there's enough data to believe she kills him. He freaks out, but I think it's just as likely that he's held in there just long enough for her to disappear.

Chainsawsuit Original Also possible, but my feeling was that it was heavily implied as a result of the helicopter conversation at the beginning where it's said that no one is allowed with [insert distance] of the compound ever under any circumstances, meaning rescue is impossible. It's possible that there's a time lock or something, but it isn't really even hinted at. Keep up the good work though, man.

What I was about to say. Everyone in the world knows that Caleb won this contest, and if Nathan, this extremely important multi-billionaire is found murdered, inevitably she would be found if they ran away together, or just left him alive. As it is, she does take a chance she doesn't have to, and leaves him alive. There is a possibility that whoever services/supplies/cleans Nathan's compound will be stopping by soon. Caleb's experimental time is over, so Nathan should have been in touch with the outside world soon, and people would start wondering why not.

+CalAnime Princess Mononoke. Great screenplay & adaptation into english.