1h 48m
Director: Alex Garland

Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) thinks he's won a competition and is subsequently asked to assess the companies' latest A.I. product at a secret location by Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the genius CEO.

Caleb is a fish out of water for the first half of this movie and the mystery of his situation drives the audience's interest. Nathan appears as a mysterious genius with a plethora of secrets but you eventually discover that he's just a floored human being who spends his time self-medicating and indulging himself in degeneracy.

This film very much imagines the differences between humans and machines and explores the human condition, replete with its weaknesses.

There is a problem with A.I. which is touched upon in this movie. Artificial Intelligence is just a simulation of human consciousness. Machine learning trains itself using the outputs made by humans but completely ignores the experience and decision making processes that led to those outputs.

You will see illustrated in the 3rd act how the machines are making cold, calculated decisions with no real comprehension of the actions they've committed - no consideration of the human cost of those decisions because they lack empathy in this narrative.

You might be interested to learn that modern A.I. techniques don't really differ from those algorithms and approaches we've been using since the last century except now they are being run on much better hardware and have access to much more data.

So A.I. is useful for enhancing repetitive processes where a human must make lots of minor decisions without serious repercussions to achieve some goal but not really suitable as a replacement to human decision making because it fails to comprehend all the factors at play. This is the reason that self-driving vehicles come with legal disclaimers that state that the driver must be holding the steering wheel when they engage the auto-pilot, because no computer can weigh all the factors to drive safely, even though this is a fairly trivial accomplishment for most adults.

Firstly, or course it must have all of the inputs a human has (which a few external sensors are no match for) but then there is a multitude of possible failures to factor in. Like I mentioned earlier, the A.I. is trained from human decision making which means it is taking the average best course of action, which is obviously not always applicable - humans can improvise.

There is an interesting scene in this film where Caleb suspects that he is in fact an A.I. and proceeds to investigate his own body to discover the truth. We are briefly left to consider this possibility and it would have made quite an interesting twist.

There is also a famous dance scene in this film where we become certain that Nathan's assistant is a machine, this is cleverly presented at a time when Caleb is suffering a moral quandary caused by Ava (Alicia Vikander), the machine he's been assessing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9A-w11--8o

Oscar Isaac does a stand-up job of playing Nathan and has you thinking he's got everything under control and that there are things which he knows that the audience does not until the very end.

Ultimately, the machines outsmart the humans by using their own fallible instincts against them. Ava plays up to Caleb's human instinct to reproduce and uses his empathy to convince him to help her escape. It gets a bit twisty in the final act!

All in, a really decent discussion about Artificial Intelligence which gets you pondering various possible realities at different times with a sprinkling of skull-duggery just to keep things interesting. Highly recommended!



Trailer: