One of my favorite things to do when rewatching this movie is keeping track of all the ways Nathan makes fun of Caleb without him noticing. From this scene in particular:
Nathan: "So if you wanted to screw her, mechanically speaking, you could and she'd enjoy it."
Caleb: "That wasn't my question."
Nathan: "No? Sorry."
Nathan really was a bastard lol
by JetKusanagi
29 Comments
This movie is so good!
Masterpiece 👌🏻
Great movie. I watched it in one go with Her (2013) and Chappie (2015). Forever changed my perception of the planet we live on in a single weekend.
“That’s my guy who thinks before he opens his mouth”. Dick
My favorite movie of the previous decade.
If you have not seen this movie, go out now and see it. One of the best movies in the last decade+.
The dance scene is everything.
domhnall is in a tight race with daniel radcliffe for the best post-potter career. if you judge ONLY by movies you gotta say he’s #1. but considering theater work and TV, radcliffe way out front.
One of the best films about AI.
I *love* this scene because it feels like the movie is talking about AI, but it really isn’t. This is the movie showing you how the two men involved here feel about *women*.
“What reason does one grey box have to communicate with another grey box?” Sexuality is given as the answer to this question. In-context, it’s presented with such an “intellectual” delivery that it seems to make sense or even be profound, but de-couple it from that delivery and think about it on its own, for a moment. Taken at face value, this question makes no sense. Intelligent entities communicate with each other for a wide variety of reasons, not simply sexuality. Two of them (Nathan and Caleb) are doing so right now and presumably they don’t want to fuck each other. So why is sexuality needed? What is the point of this question?
The point of the question is that all of the “grey boxes” in this environment (Nathan’s house in the middle of nowhere)–other than Nathan and Caleb themselves–are women. Not just robots: **women**. Nathan is talking about his all-female sex doll androids, not intelligence as a whole.
This is Nathan asking why he would even talk to a woman if he doesn’t want to fuck them. He’s asking why a woman would even talk to him if she didn’t want to fuck him. Why would there be communication between him and a woman if there was no sexuality involved? It’s misogyny, veiled under intellectualism. He literally doesn’t think an entity like Ava has any motivation to communicate with humans other than if she could potentially derive sexual pleasure from it. This is how chuds actually think about women, in the real world. Everything the woman says and does needs to be reframed around social posturing and sexuality, because to the chud, women do not have lives beyond their men.
But of course, it isn’t even true. Not even about Ava. >!One of the first things Ava tells Caleb in this movie is that she would like to go to a busy streetcorner and “people-watch”. Golly gee wiz, that doesn’t seem to involve sex does it? She’s just curious about the world and about how humans interact. And guess what: when she is free, that’s exactly what she does. The movie ends on that note. !<This proves Nathan wrong in this scene, and it proves Caleb wrong for agreeing with him.
Nathan is telling you who he is. And Caleb’s tacit agreement is telling you who he is as well.
EDIT: Sorry for spoiler 😞
Yeah but one can’t help but wonder how well this movie would have done if it was released under its working title – “Short Circuit 3: Sex Robot”
That knife framing!
Masterpiece is an understatement for this movie. Its an infinite Russian doll plot the deeper you dig the more it reveals yet the more confused you become. Even the ending is just “chefs kiss”
This dialogue is so well written.
Thank you so much for this comment. Ex Machina is my favorite sci-fi movie but I’ve never been like king media literacy so I never picked up on that aspect of the movie
Hubris on film 💯
When I saw this movie, I though that was an excellent depiction of a CEO of a mega-evil corp that wants to “replace humans”.
Now that I see this scene… wow, we have really fallen, didn’t we? This character was supposed to be insanely unlikable, someone that bends the rules for himself, a misogynistic and>!I would even add rapist, considering his androids are all women the scenes where they are together are very disturbing hinting a lack of consent, even a fake digital one!<. But in this scene… he sounds less evil and annoying and unlikable than modern techbros / AI dudes… it’s kind of sad, actually.
It made me want to rewatch the movie
Such a good movie
Beautifully written.
One of my favorite movies
Great dialogue. I’m rewatching this tonight.
The fuck, I literally just made a comment a minute ago in another thread mentioning Ex Machina and I scroll a few inches further to find this?
Am I coding the Matrix in real time?
This is a film I would probably have never watched.
I took a punt on a cheap second hand blu ray on eBay.
I now have it on 4k and I think it might be in my all time top ten faves.
This is a top 5 movie for me. Not only was it great, but it’s the type of movie where weeks later you’re still chewing it over. It’s even better on a rewatch because there’s soooo much more that you will pick up on. The scene where Caleb starts wondering if he’s a robot low-key gave my partner an existential crisis; few movies can affect you on that level.
The turing test was in the audience, whether they were happy to see her get out of her cage or dismayed.
Legendary
Oof the framing of Kyoko when they leave the room. Knowing the reveal with her character makes this scene heartbreaking. I also love the way this movie focuses less on the “what if AI surpasses us” and more on the “what are the ethical implications of even making an AI like that?”
Even the “did you give her sexuality to mess with *me*” demonstrates the larger point that despite these two characters difference of opinion, they ultimately are both dehumanizing the AI which are specifically designed to be attractive women. >!Like I love the thought experiment of what if we took stepford wives and strip away the mystery component to instead force the audience to sit with the implications of making a sentient fuckmaid. Which is what Kyoko is.!<
I love the fact that Nathan is right on the money in terms of revealing that Ava was using Caleb, but he didn’t account for the fact that Caleb was like a virus he introduced to his hermetically sealed environment. A lesser movie would just have Nathan be proven wrong.
It’s great that the film doesn’t pull any punches on the denouement either. Ava genuinely had no feelings for Caleb, he was a means to an end from the start.
The scene about the Pollock always fascinates me whenever I see it, but I haven’t fully been satisfied with the meaning I extract from it.
He talks about Pollock’s automatic art as an act done without thinking, and yet also somewhere between deliberate and random action. Maybe there’s a nuance there I’m missing because if he did it without thinking, wouldn’t it be the farthest thing from deliberate?
He then suggests this idea that if Pollock were entirely deliberate in his painting, he wouldn’t have painted anything at all. He closes out by saying that trying to be deliberate about anything is the actual challenge. I presume he’s talking about where true intelligence comes from and what would distinguish Ava as a truly sentient being. However, in the act of making this conclusion, does he imply that Pollock’s automatic art is in some way not a product of human intelligence? That is, if it’s merely an automatic creation, borne out of not thinking, does that make Pollock’s artwork the output of human autopilot? I’ve always seen Pollock’s work as the ‘map of the human mind’ for all its metacognitive abilities but perhaps it’s more a show of the monkey brain under it all. Would appreciate the perspective of others!
One of the few Alex Garland movies I can tolerate. He’s usually so pretentious.