MOVIE OF THE MONTH: FEBRUARY 2015

                                                                 
Director   : Alex Garland
Story        : Alex Garland
Camera    : Rob Hardy
Editor       : Mark Day
Running   : 108 min
Country    : United Kingdom
Release     : 23 January 2015 

At a key moment in novelist-turned-film-maker Alex Garland’s provocative sci-fi flick, a naive young computer programmer asks the Colonel Kurtz-like creator of an impressively human artificial intelligence why he chose to sexualise his robot; to give it a gender, an attractive face, a flirtatious manner. 

The two-part answer is telling : first, that everything in nature is gendered, that all thoughts and actions are (on some level) driven by a reproductive urge, and no biogenetic impulse exists without a priori acknowledgment of attraction. For a machine to attain the status of “singularity” (the point at which the human and artificial become indistinguishable) it must have a sexual component. 

And second, a primary pleasure that only the obtuse or uptight would wish to ignore or deny. The same answer could be given to explain the form of a dazzlingly good-looking technological thriller that occasionally dresses its weightier questions of the nature of intelligence, replete with titillating displays of synthesised (female) skin and generically disavowed voyeurism. 

Yet at its heart is an ironic absence of sexuality, a detachment from desire similar to that exhibited in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, in which Scarlett Johansson’s predatory alien inhabits the form of an alluring young woman in order to prey, Species-style, upon unsuspecting humans. 

Just as Blade Runner wondered whether its lifelike replicants could really fall in love, so Ex Machina spirals obsessively around the question not of artificial intelligence but artificial affection, worrying away at the authenticity of attraction as an indicator of consciousness itself.

Review Courtesy: http://www.theguardian.com