She's Always A Woman [Review: Ex Machina]

Programmer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins the opportunity to spend a week with his company's mega-rich and secretive boss, Nathan (Oscar Isaac). On arrival at the remote and ridiculously expensive location, inhabited only by Nathan and his housemaid Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), Caleb discovers his real purpose - to Turing-test Nathan's secret pet project, an artificial intelligence in a humanoid robot called Ava (played by Alicia Vikander).

Alicia Vikander as Ava

I love it when this happens: a film is promoted as if it is an effects-laden, action-heavy Hollywood blockbuster, posters on buses and everything, but when you get to see it, it turns out to be a low-key, four-handed character-driven stage play. Brilliant! There's plenty of darkness, drama, threat and revelations for all four characters, but not a single fireball.

Alex Garland's involvement probably boosted the promotional budget, but rightly or wrongly, it's probably the iconic look of Ava's transparent robot body that has mis-sold the movie. I do think, once again, that roboticists should think twice before designing their robots to resemble attractive women - have they not seen The Machine, Humans, Battlestar Galactica, or (especially) Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery? The warnings were all there. Robots need to look like robots, or there'll be so much trouble.

When the Singularity comes, it will look like this...

Comments

Do Androids Cry Over Electric Sheep [Review: Blade Runner 2049]

What stands out about the world of Blade Runner 2049? Firstly that it's really, really FUBAR. The pollution smog is just the start of it - Los Angeles an expanded city surrounded by favelas and then giant dykes keeping out the rising sea level, another famous American city a radioactive wasteland, Wall-E style refuse dumps, children extracting metals from old circuitry in giant orphanages, the human population fed by millions of acres of protein-maggot farms. The Off World Colonies are a distant dream for a lucky few. And it doesn't appear to be a great time for women generally - more on that story later. Secondly, give Gosling's character a helmet and this would be Judge Dredd. The LA setting is completely Mega City One (the cheap-n-cheerful plastic version from the 2000AD comics, not the boring Stallone movie version). Gosling might not have Dredd's stature but he's the same no-nonsense dispenser of justice, at least when it comes to running down old Nexus 8 repli...

Bright Eyes [Review: Humans episode 3]

I'm enjoying Humans more with each episode. I like the easy Asimov references. I like the way different characters get to show new depths or aspects of their personality each week - and the way, each week, we get a more disturbing version of what synths can do, whether limited to their original programme like NHS droid Vera (Rebecca Front) or whether illegally modded or freed like Niska (Emily Berrington). Last week Niska discovered she could kill - this week she makes her bid for freedom and starts to explore the world. It turns out she has some scruples, or at least limits on what she's prepared to do. Emily Berrington as Niska Anita (Gemma Chan) is still the central character. It's becoming clear how good she is at lying and manipulating her owners - but she's different from the other synths, and when Mattie (Lucy Carless) tries to hack into her system, just for a few seconds we get a hint of what she really is. It's compelling viewing, gradually building into a ...

I've Got A Brand New Alien Harvester [Review: Evil Aliens]

Sometimes you need to turn your brain off and just watch something stupid and bloody... Evil Aliens is a comic horror film from 2005 starring Emily Booth as a cynical TV journalist and featuring Red Dwarf's Norman Lovett sadly only in a minor role. Booth and her crew are sent to investigate an alien abduction story on an isolated Welsh farm, accompanied by an eccentric UFO expert played by Jamie Honeybourne. It soon becomes clear that the aliens are somewhat hostile, and the film progresses into a series of close encounters of the messy kind. This film is an unashamed gorefest, and it's very clear the budget has been spent mainly on realistic blood-and-guts effect shots which are detailed, delightfully inventive and utterly gratuitous. Everything else is cheaper - the script is perhaps not as fine tuned as it could be, the aliens appear to have bought cheap Predator costumes on eBay and rendered their spaceship CGI on Microsoft Paint. The acting is all hammed-up melodrama but i...

Thenessgroup

Search This Blog