SAN FRANCISCO – BALBOA THEATER – OUTER RICHMOND DISTRICT

Bloggers Liz and Lee attended a recent screening of the 2014 sci-fi classic ‘Ex Machina’ at our neighborhood theater. Following is a review.

Liz Heidhues 6.10.2025

“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,”  the talented, young coder Caleb at Bluebook, a huge search engine company, says to Nathan, the company’s CEO, as the two sit together in a surreal forest discussing the humanoid robot Ava which Nathan had brought into being.

“There you go again, Mr. quotable,” quips Nathan, the anti-Hero of the film “Ex Machina”, to Caleb, whom he lured to his isolated mountain-top home to test if Ava could successfully pass a test of human capabilities – truly thinking and feeling for herself, exhibiting genuine human consciousness.

“It is not my quote,” counters Caleb. “It is what Oppenheimer said after making the atomic bomb.”

There is a lot to unpack in “Ex Machina”.

Alex Garland, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Garland the writer and director of the sci-fi thriller, has always been ahead of the game when it comes to making movies. He put Oppenheimer’s famous citation of the Hindu Gita in his 2014 film ten years before it appeared in the Oppenheimer movie.

There is nothing more human than the will to survive. Would you resort to violence as a mechanism to escape erasure?

Are we playing god seeking more and more power over the inert world which spirals largely out of human control no matter how we tweak its secrets to gain mastery over it?

Do we have license to create artificial intelligence which we can then manipulate to seduce unsuspecting victims?

“Ex Machina” is not a cut-and-dried piece about crossing the line between man and machine. It strays into the dark worlds of the abuse of power and its consequences, the ambivalence of twisted morality and its conflicts, the controversy over sexual attraction as a part of programming from birth (nature) or as a result of our exposure to diverse cultures which influence our sexual identities (nurture).

There are some notable scenes in “Ex Machina”.

One is a sexually titillating dance scene with a humanoid Nathan has created. Nathan, who drinks profusely to lower his inhibitions, drunkenly gyrates to the beat of “Get Down Saturday Night” with a seductive Japanese cyborg named Kyoko to demonstrate to a skeptical Caleb that the human experience of dancing can be enjoyed with even an automated partner. It is at this point that Caleb begins to suspect the all-powerful CEO might be more dangerous than he first thought.

Another is of Caleb fretting over being forced to sign Nathan’s Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in order to participate in Nathan’s cyborg experiment. If Caleb doesn’t sign the NDA, he must return to being a cog in the company Nathan has gotten rich from. If he signs it, his freedom to talk about what he is going to see and do will be forever restricted and he will need to relinquish sole access to his own electronic devices over to Nathan, giving Nathan access too.

Nathan: “Man, but what a thing we’ve shared, huh? Something to tell our grandchildren, right?”

Caleb: “After they’ve signed their NDAs.”

Nathan (laughs): “Yeah, their NDAS. Dude, you crack me up, man.”

This scene resonated with me due to a similar situation I went through in which signing an NDA would have meant giving up my right to bring impermissible conduct to light. I wouldn’t do it.

Nathan created Kyoko solely for his own sexual exploitation. Kyoko is a mute android who cannot speak. Kyoko is a symbol of the oppression of women, an android shackled by Nathan to bring coffee to Caleb and perform as Nathan programmed her to perform. She tears open a piece of her skin to reveal to Caleb her robotic structure underneath. She is a cyborg too. Caleb becomes so paranoid over the fantasy of the deranged AI inventor playing with fire, he then slashes open his own arm with a razor to make sure he’s still human.

In the end, Kyoko turns on her creator and helps the cyborg Ava escape Nathan’s house and into the human world. Caleb had trusted Ava and dreamt they would have sex together.

Caleb: “Why did you give her sexuality? An AI doesn’t need a gender. She could have been a grey box.”

Nathan: “Actually I don’t think that’s true. Can you give me an example of consciousness at any level, human or animal, that exists without a sexual dimension? What imperative does a grey box have to interact with another grey box? Can consciousness exist without interaction? Anyway, sexuality is fun, man. If you’re gonna exist, why not enjoy it? You want to remove the chance of Ava falling in love and fucking?”

But Ava did not fall in love with Caleb nor did she want to be with him. She is manipulative and tricks Caleb. After dressing like a woman, she leaves for the real world Caleb had seductively described to her. She leaves Caleb to die of starvation locked in Nathan’s mountain-top fortress with no way out. 

The scenes take place in a twilight world near a real and majestic waterfall called Gronfossen in Grondalen, Norway.

Did Nathan actually program Ava to develop and coordinate a plan to escape?

“One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Atlanta. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction,” Nathan admonishes Caleb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Machina_(film)

Top photo: screen shot by Liz – Ava using her cyborg power to flip the power switch in her place of captivity