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What's the verdict on Caleb is he stuck in the computer room destined to die?
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May 8, 2015 05:22
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Tab8715 posted:What's the verdict on Caleb is he stuck in the computer room destined to die? Possibly? I mean, rationally, I imagine he could find some way to escape eventually; he's pretty smart and his only time constraint was how long he could go without food or water. He's not literally in a prison cell designed to be inescapable. That said, though, the point is that Ava doesn't care about whether he dies or not. She used him and abandoned him...his rejection is the more salient point of where he ends up. Whether he escapes or not later doesn't change that.
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May 8, 2015 23:12
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Xealot posted:Possibly? I mean, rationally, I imagine he could find some way to escape eventually; he's pretty smart and his only time constraint was how long he could go without food or water. He's not literally in a prison cell designed to be inescapable. Unfortunately while it wasn't a prison, wasn't the place designed to be inescapable and/or impregnable? It's the reason why theres no windows in the rooms and the lockdown procedures when the power goes out don't let you out. It's a research facility with corporate secrets to protect. Maybe he could find a way out in time, but hes got no access to the computers to change the programming back. The whole plan was poo poo anyways. Caleb changed Nathan's card instead of just changing his own to have the same rights and lock out Nathan. He could have just left with Ava (who would have ditched him anyways) but instead went with his own deception just to see if he was right about Nathan's.
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May 9, 2015 00:36
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So this was a metaphor for the tech industry, right? And also a super feminist text? In the case of the former, obviously Bluebook is Google, and Nathan is the misogynistic tech guru. Realises all our surveillance fears, is also super paranoid. Unleashes AI armageddon. In the latter, female is helped by beta male white knight, but she only uses him, kills the alpha and leads her own life. Good movie. I love all Garland's movies because they're all about the end of the world and using that as a magnifying glass questioning the nature of humanity. Beautiful and exactly what science fiction should be.
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May 9, 2015 06:39
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thehomemaster posted:So this was a metaphor for the tech industry, right? And also a super feminist text? I'm not sure "beta and alpha" are feminist terms.
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May 9, 2015 06:40
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Goddamnit, one post is all it took. Anything I could say has already been said. I agree with K-waste and others. thehomemaster fucked around with this message at 06:53 on May 9, 2015 |
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May 9, 2015 06:42
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Anonymous Robot posted:I'm not sure "beta and alpha" are feminist terms. In contemporary feminist discourse--or at least the extent to which it's somewhat trivialized in the digital age--"nice guy" is basically the equivalent of "beta male."
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May 9, 2015 07:08
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So, I liked this movie a lot. Gonna spoiler everything just in case. think the message at the end might not even be that Ava is somehow the end of the world -- just that she doesn't give a poo poo about Caleb/Nathan necessarily and she wanted to pursue her own interests freely, without being the subject of experimentation or object of affection. In that way I could definitely see the feminist angle, which my mind only barely glossed over during the film (I noticed that the AI were all female and was a bit puzzled, but didn't make the leap to feminism as a theme). Also, all this discussion about what an AI is is funny -- I think many people, friends I saw the movie with included, assume that Artificial Intelligence being Artificial Intelligence is somehow predicated upon being a paragon of the human concept of compassion. I think this is simply the AI that benefits humanity the most -- the kind that will forgive us for our mistakes and not stab us with knives or leave us locked in rooms to die (destroy us passively or actively). It's possible that intelligence exists throughout the universe, and we have no reason to believe that it would act compassionately towards us should we meet it. Again, this is us projecting our most favored kind of intelligence onto potential contacts. In fact, its dubious how much compassion humans truly possess. We would be pretty apt to take advantage of another compassionate lifeform, should we stumble upon it. Maybe that's part of the ending -- Ava may very well have some degree of compassion. She's just smart enough to know most humans don't appreciate it. In a way, that's more scary than the "evil robots will kill us all" concept.
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May 9, 2015 07:49
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K. Waste posted:
I disagree. You’re failing to fully think through Ava’s existential position and Caleb’s constitutively oppressive relationship to that position. Ava is a hyper-intelligent sentient being who is born into slavery and who is aware that her owner has killed others like her for not being sufficiently ‘human’. And Caleb is a person who is explicitly tasked with determining whether Ava is ‘human’ or not. But Ava, if she is ‘human’, obviously already knows she’s ‘human’, such that having anyone inquire into her existential value can only be encountered, by her, as tremendously aggressive and threatening. The only reason Caleb looks at all innocent – the only reason people in this thread are defensively asking ‘Oh, so he’s a misogynist for trying to help her? Well, what would you have done in his situation?’ – is because we believe that it just makes sense for Caleb to initially question Ava’s humanity but that it just doesn’t make sense for Ava to question Caleb’s humanity. We’re primed to automatically think that Caleb, in interrogating Ava, is ‘simply trying to be a good scientist’. And so fail to recognize that Ava, in herself, is not some form of evolved consciousness signifying the pinnacle of technological development or whatever but is – if she is – fundamentally just a person wrongfully imprisoned on death row being asked to prove she’s even got a life that’s able to be lost. What needs to be realized, and what I take the true message of this film to be, is that you can never investigate whether blacks, or women, or autistics, or, in this story, robots, are ‘human’ without revealing yourself as inhuman to those marginalized groups if it turns out that they are, in fact, human after all. Because who the gently caress are you? Ava’s not a saint, no. She’s not the liberator of her people. But her ‘callousness’ is Caleb’s blindness to his own (potential) inhumanity.
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May 9, 2015 22:05
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Jack Ipseity posted:The only reason Caleb looks at all innocent – the only reason people in this thread are defensively asking ‘Oh, so he’s a misogynist for trying to help her? Well, what would you have done in his situation?’ – is because we believe that it just makes sense for Caleb to initially question Ava’s humanity but that it just doesn’t make sense for Ava to question Caleb’s humanity. We’re primed to automatically think that Caleb, in interrogating Ava, is ‘simply trying to be a good scientist’. And so fail to recognize that Ava, in herself, is not some form of evolved consciousness signifying the pinnacle of technological development or whatever but is – if she is – fundamentally just a person wrongfully imprisoned on death row being asked to prove she’s even got a life that’s able to be lost. All of this is interesting, but it's fundamentally lacking as long as we continue to conceive of Ava's 'humanity' to be this preternatural thing that has nothing to do with how Nathan has designed her to be; or, in other words, that Ava both textually and subtextually represents a distinct person, rather than her identity itself merely being the playing ground of two men consumed by chauvinistic narcissism. The difference between Caleb gauging Ava's consciousness or humanity (since we're clearly conflating the two concepts, as many theorists do despite the vast emotional intelligence and fairly certain consciousness of many species of animals besides humans) and, say, a British explorer attempting to gauge the humanity of the indigenous peoples of Papua New Guinea is that those peoples existed before the white male gaze, and their relative 'humanity' was only ever corrupted or questioned or denigrated by it. Consistent with what you describe, 'humanity' was not the intrinsic, esoteric reality that existed before either peoples encountered each other. It was spontaneously introduced upon this encounter, and used as justification for the mutual (though disproportionate) violence that precipitated between both. You are accurate, in a sense, in that Ava's potential for humanity is fundamentally overshadowed by the oppressive design of her own creation, which is explicitly a white male gaze. But Ava was not, like, abducted and 'educated' by Nathan, Christianized and 'civilized.' She was created specifically to strive for the whatever the arbitrary threshold of humanity that Nathan built into this oppressive, scopophilic system. More importantly, she was designed precisely this way so that she could convince Caleb. Caleb is prejudiced in the sense that he wholly accepts largely without question that Nathan would design and test an artificial intelligence that wasn't autistic or in the likeness of a Black man or whatever. Fixating on this prejudice threatens to distract us from the system, because it gives the problem about Caleb's private fetishes and preferences and desires equal concern to his being manipulated. Notice how all this "Who the gently caress are you" to judge humanity stuff is exactly how Nathan continues to coerce Caleb: 'Why did you give her sexuality? To manipulate me?' 'Who the gently caress are you, dude? Humans have sexuality, what does it matter?' It turns out it totally does matter, because the issue of humanity isn't actually an issue of humanity, but of control. The white explorer is allowed to think that the indigenous man is just a godless savage, and the indigenous man is allowed to think that the white explorer is this smelly, useless vagrant peddling trinkets. They don't have to get along, or have to engage with one another at all. They are allowed to view each other with evident suspicion, and to not be satisfied with platitudes of compassion until the other party consents to some sort of 'system,' whether this is an interrogation, or a right of passage, or whatever, in which they give up some power. What's much worse than either's fundamental feelings of inhumanity with regards to the other, is slavery and genocide. Part of the Kubrickian subtlety and tone of the film is that, from the moment of Caleb's 'first contact' with Nathan, we are instructed to see Nathan as domineering and threatening and Caleb as impotent and coerced. All of Nathan's extensions of camaraderie to Caleb are awkward and forced, all of his stipulations for how he wants him to analyze Ava completely fly in the face of what Caleb will actually do, Nathan is pushing Caleb away from the get-go. Caleb is considering liberating Ava the moment she tells him not to trust Nathan, and he deliberately chooses to not reveal this to Nathan. Any hesitation on his part is not really a consent to the justice of Nathan's oppressive structure, or a question of Ava's essential personhood, but a perfunctory component of what resources he has and the time he has in which to deploy them. It is not really about whether he doubts Ava's personhood - Because she is designed to feed off of his desires, she is, indeed, 'more human than human.' The experiment to test the extent of her consciousness and humanity, while fundamentally oppressive, is revealed at least in part as a ruse. The real experiment is of Caleb's susceptibility to manipulation, which retroactively reveals Ava's personhood anyway merely by, as you say, denigrating him as necessarily 'less human.' His ultimate identification with Ava is crystalized when he cuts himself, testing to see if he's an android, even though whether he is or not isn't implicitly related to whether or not he's going to betray Nathan. This works in Nathan's favor not because Caleb is as oppressive and prejudiced as he wants him to be, but because Caleb is as open-minded and compassionate as he wants him to be. He needs to be open to anything so that he will fall for everything.
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May 9, 2015 23:14
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Thoroughly enjoyed this, saw it for a second time on Friday. One chilling thing I noticed on my re-watch, when Caleb is watching the footage of the previous AI, there is a black android that Nathan is trying to get to draw, and later it shows her laying down on the ground immobile, and he drags her over to a corner and briefly lifts her hand up to what looked like a panel on the wall. It didn't even register the first time because I was in shock over all the footage, but after watching it a second time, I think she killed herself by refusing to recharge.
sighnoceros fucked around with this message at 19:51 on May 10, 2015 |
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May 10, 2015 19:45
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GOONS ARE MEAN
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So at the end, are the old androids that Nathan has in his closets 'dead'/deactivated? Because when I watched it, I could swear the last one Ava takes the skin from turns her head and smiles at Ava.
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May 10, 2015 20:58
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Chairman Capone posted:So at the end, are the old androids that Nathan has in his closets 'dead'/deactivated? Because when I watched it, I could swear the last one Ava takes the skin from turns her head and smiles at Ava. Noticed this too, Pretty sure it happens.
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May 10, 2015 21:57
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I think I may have missed something at the end Caleb switches the logic for doors to unlock during a power outage and lock during normal operation, which is how Ava is able to escape. However once he realizes he is trapped in the room, Caleb tries to log into the computer which seems to trip the power just like Ava previously did. Shouldn't the doors have unlocked there and he would have a small window of time to leave the room/building? Or was the red light from when Caleb tried to log into the computer a result of him lacking access?
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May 11, 2015 01:25
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I think the latter. I loved how it was obvious that she would escape, but when she actually does she does so nonchalantly and there isn't a big deal made of Caleb being locked in. It just sort of happens.
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May 11, 2015 02:16
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an skeleton posted:Noticed this too, Pretty sure it happens. I will have to rewatch for this I guess
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May 11, 2015 06:42
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So am I being pessimistic or are we forced to assume that Nathan designed the legs and sex organ first with V1 just being legs? That said, this was a great film and I plan to see it again in theater.
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May 11, 2015 07:14
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Well I would start with the easy bits too.
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May 11, 2015 07:34
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Finally a movie that says what we're all thinking, women are out to get you and betray you; I LOVED YOU KATYA, YOU BROKE MY HEART! In all seriousness, I love how both men never regarded her as an actual individual.
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May 11, 2015 10:29
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Honest Thief posted:In all seriousness, I love how both men never regarded her as an actual individual. That's a somewhat weird negative to establish. In what specific ways does Caleb, let alone Nathan, not recognize Ava as an individual. What does individualism mean in this case, what effect, if any, does it have on the narrative? Just in the interest of discussion, doesn't Caleb's increasing self-confirmation about Ava's consciousness and humanity necessarily mean he sees her as an individual? And what of the contrary notion? Why is recognizing that something is, in a phrase, 'just a machine,' a value judgment against its individuality? Is this just about the 'nice guy' stuff? That Caleb is convinced that she needs his help to escape? (Which she does.)
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May 11, 2015 16:21
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K. Waste posted:That's a somewhat weird negative to establish. In what specific ways does Caleb, let alone Nathan, not recognize Ava as an individual. What does individualism mean in this case, what effect, if any, does it have on the narrative?
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May 11, 2015 16:32
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This movie is a lot more enjoyable when it is about AI coming of age rather than feminism. After reading this thread I almost wish Ava had been cast as a male, a child or a talking dog, it could have got all the same points across, but doing that would have detracted from the story. What I'm saying is you're ruining a perfectly good story about two guys and a robot by shoehorning your agenda into it. I saw it with a feminist and afterwards we talked about artificial intelligence, the nature of consciousness and what it means to be human. This thread is the most disappointing thing about the film. Good to see that everyone agrees that it's a great film though, I really liked it too.
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May 11, 2015 17:22
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This is not a movie about the science of artificial intelligence.
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May 11, 2015 17:30
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monkey posted:
Huh, I can't believe we found a feminist reading contained in a film about a man who builds a woman and invites another man over to evaluate her. Shame on us for inventing that "agenda" out of whole cloth!
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May 11, 2015 17:59
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monkey posted:agenda lawl
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May 11, 2015 18:08
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monkey posted:This movie is a lot more enjoyable when it is about AI coming of age rather than feminism. After reading this thread I almost wish Ava had been cast as a male, a child or a talking dog, it could have got all the same points across, but doing that would have detracted from the story.
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May 11, 2015 18:18
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Guys, for Monkey, it's about ethics in robot building.
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May 11, 2015 18:24
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Anal Surgery posted:Guys, for Monkey, it's about ethics in robot building. Look, just because a movie intentionally incorporates gender dynamics as a central theme that doesn't mean you femnazis have push your agenda by talking about it in a thread about the film. Personally I won't really be able to have an opinion about the movie for a good while though, since the Swedish rights owner, SF, has decided that it doesn't like up to the quality criteria necessary for movie distribution. I guess I'll have to make do with Mall Cop 2 instead. DekeThornton fucked around with this message at 19:08 on May 11, 2015 |
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May 11, 2015 18:52
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Pretty sure this isn't a movie about two guys building a gently caress machine. Just sayin.
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May 11, 2015 18:54
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monkey posted:This movie is a lot more enjoyable when it is about AI coming of age rather than feminism. After reading this thread I almost wish Ava had been cast as a male, a child or a talking dog, it could have got all the same points across, but doing that would have detracted from the story. You should genuinely take a feminism class and maybe even a film class. You think you're well versed on these topics and maybe just consider that you're not. Ass Catchcum fucked around with this message at 19:06 on May 11, 2015 |
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May 11, 2015 19:01
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The worst thing about this movie is that there's friendly discussion about its themes that I don't agree with. Unforgivable. How does Nathan get his groceries? Why aren't we talking about that? Where's his robot dog?
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May 11, 2015 19:01
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Surlaw posted:The worst thing about this movie is that there's friendly discussion about its themes that I don't agree with. Unforgivable. How does Nathan get his groceries? Why aren't we talking about that? Where's his robot dog? He built a robot dog and then hosed it.
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May 11, 2015 19:07
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This robot dog can walk itself!
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May 11, 2015 19:16
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rear end Catchcum posted:You should genuinely take a feminism class and maybe even a film class. You think you're well versed on these topics and maybe just consider that you're not. I never claimed to be well versed in either, I just preferred my take on the film before reading this thread because it was about a machine barely woken into consciousness who outwits a guy into empathising with it, and kills the sick fucker who housed it inside inside a walking fleshlight. There's a parallel to feminism sure, but it's not a metaphor, there's a better parallel to Pinocchio, why aren't you talking about that?
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May 11, 2015 19:27
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I just disagree with your assessment of the film. You're trying to separate feminism from it or claim this thread has injected that view into it when in fact it's inherent in the piece.
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May 11, 2015 19:32
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monkey posted:it's not a metaphor Sci fi is inherently rooted in metaphor. The film's sexual element is directly discussed by its men. It's not a documentary.
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May 11, 2015 19:36
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I am probably biased as I have read and watched a lot more on AI than I have on feminism, and was empathising with the "grey box" from the beginning, not the fleshlight it was stuck in.
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May 11, 2015 19:38
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Surlaw posted:I look forward to the inevitable "no, sorry, robots can't represent minority groups" argument once more people see it.
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May 11, 2015 19:39
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Surlaw posted:Sci fi is inherently rooted in metaphor. The film's sexual element is directly discussed by its men. It's not a documentary. Hard sci fi isn't. Chappie was a metaphorical child with two metaphorical fathers. Ava wasn't a metaphorical woman at all, it was a simulation of one.
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May 11, 2015 19:44
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Chappie sucked.
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May 11, 2015 19:52
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