Is It OK to Love a Robot? 'Ex Machina' Director Alex Garland Says Yes
Five months into 2015, Ex Machina, the sci-fi drama from filmmaker Alex Garland (Dredd, 28 Days Later), is the breakout indie hit of the year — and one that has people talking about some complicated ethical and scientific questions. Garland’s movie continues cinema’s long tradition of creating a fictional future in a bid to question what’s happening in the real world today.
And as he told Yahoo Movies, he’s actually quite excited about the future.
Ex Machina is the latest film to grapple with our growing reliance on powerful tech companies, and the potential opportunities and pitfalls presented by true artificial intelligence. District 9 director Neill Blomkamp’s Chappie turned an AI robot into a vulnerable and dangerous child, while the blockbuster Avengers: Age of Ultron envisioned a chaos-driven, wirelessly ubiquitous murder bot bent on human destruction. Ex Machina — a sleeper hit starring Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson — forgoes the violence and explosions in favor of a more intimate look at what makes us human.
In the film, Isaac plays Nathan, the young genius billionaire founder of a website called Blue Book, which in this near-future world serves as a quasi-successor to both Facebook and Google. He’s spent the last few years developing what he claims is workable, sentient artificial intelligence, and invites Gleeson’s Caleb to a remote house/lab to interact with it. He begins to develop a close bond — and perhaps romantic feelings — for the beautiful (and clearly robotic) AI named Ava (Vikander). The attraction he feels is a plot element that confounds Caleb and becomes the moral hinge on which the plot swings — but it seems perfectly normal and acceptable to Garland.
“The thing that we value in each other is our minds,” he told Yahoo Movies in an interview last week. “You could have a very beautiful tree but if someone said, ‘We’re going to kill a human or cut down that beautiful tree,’ you’d say ‘OK, cut down that tree.’ If you had a beautiful machine that you found aesthetically pleasing and it was sentient, why not? Fall in love, sure.”
Garland has also dealt with the question of what is human on the other end of the spectrum: As the writer of Danny Boyle’s hit 2002 flick 28 Days Later, it would seem that he helped revive the now-thriving zombie genre… though he disagrees with that assessment.
“I used to watch a lot of zombie movies when I was a teenager, and then for years and years zombies didn’t exist — they weren’t making movies about them,” he said. “Then [the 1996 Playstation video game] Resident Evil came, and I just had a moment where I said, ‘I love zombies, I’ve forgotten how much I loved zombies.’ And I suspect a whole bunch of people were also thinking at the same time, ‘Oh yeah, I love zombies, too.’”
Garland admits that he doesn’t watch much zombie-centric programming these days, but does obsess over another zombie game: Last of Us, a Playstation 3 and 4 game about a man helping a young woman across a desolate, post-apocalyptic wasteland.
