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The hotel they used for Nathan's house was both impressive and spot-on. Fantastic bit of characterization starting before we ever meet the man.
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Apr 24, 2015 04:53
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Bean posted:A question about the ending. Why did Ava allow Kyoko to die? She obviously knew how to repair herself, so knowing how to screw on a new jaw wouldn't be totally outside her ability set. I think it would make a little more sense thematically too. If Ava helped Kyoko and they both escaped, you'd get this sister wives sort of thing, whereas leaving her dead just made Ava look ruthless. Ava is ruthless.
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Apr 26, 2015 05:36
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haveblue posted:One thing I didn't get- why does Nathan drink so much? I can't remember seeing or thinking of any non-plot device reason for it. He's depressed and self-loathing.
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Apr 27, 2015 18:50
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tbp posted:no i mean Nathan should have made her always have hair on purpose, bc she'd look hotter in this way C'mon, allow them some showmanship. The movie basically does the opposite of a strip tease: instead of taking clothes off, she puts skin (and hair) on. What's the point of her being a robot if you don't get to see a little endoskeleton?
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May 15, 2015 15:01
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:The question becomes why Caleb perceives Google as a woman that saps his essence. Its ability to provide pornography so absurdly specific to his preferences that no human woman could compare. But, yeah, the movie doesn't quite pull off the "welcome to the real world" stuff as metaphor for the protagonist's psychological reality as well as The Matrix, Terminator, Blade, etc. Like, the moment when Kyoko peels back her skin, it's not really doing much because she was already figuratively a robot anyways.
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May 18, 2015 22:56
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dataisplural posted:an animal, instinctively knowing it needed the induction charger to survive, never would have left the compound. Plenty of indoor cats try to escape their home despite that being where their food is.
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May 19, 2015 20:39
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Dr. Tim Whatley posted:cats are hosed up and weird Zoo animals also frequently try to escape.
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May 20, 2015 04:05
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I don't believe Nathan ever cared about consciousness at all. The test was of how a potential customer would respond to an in-development consumer product. Caleb was a terrible choice if one wanted to evaluate the nature of Ava's AI and a perfect choice to evaluate whether a shy young man would buy himself a girlfriend. And Nathan is fairly upfront about this; he asks product-evaluation questions like "how does she make you feel?" It's Caleb who keeps trying to make it a scientific experiment, and Nathan consistently pushes him away from that.
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Jul 28, 2015 19:19
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:That's true, except that the film is far more focused on Nathan's individual 'shamelessness'. His basic motivation for creating the robots at all is his inability to enter a non-coercive relationship with a woman. He's calling Caleb in as an outside observer, who could legitimize his practices (which are coded as, basically, pedophilic). Caleb is a valuable test subject because he wants to believe that his girlfriend is a "real person" who "really loves him," who provides value on the basis of having various internal states in relation to him. Because Nathan rejects this fantasy, he can't evaluate whether someone who does could find fulfillment of it with Ava. Hence Caleb. Nathan is, as you suggest, not actually shameless. He's a melancholy alcoholic for a reason. If Caleb can fall for a literal machine, then it'll be easier for Nathan to justify his rejection of actual women. Hence Caleb being a loser, from Nathan's perspective the kind of person who falls for the illusion of love. K. Waste posted:If he was solely interested in Caleb's feelings for Ava, then why does he insinuate himself as part of the simulation as a counterpoint to her? In what sense is Nathan a counterpoint to Ava?
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Jul 28, 2015 21:45
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precision posted:the human brain has been through thousands of years of refinement and redundancy Always interesting to meet a young-Earth evolutionist.
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Dec 6, 2015 18:30
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Eyes Only posted:And it succeeded because Caleb, not Ava, outsmarted Nathan - at no point did Ava do anything that Nathan had not anticipated. Snak posted:That's exactly what I got from it. Ava escapes/succeeds because she is more human than anyone expects. Nathan expects a childlike AI and expects to anticipate its wants and needs. He is ultimately outsmarted by an adult AI who only wants basics freedom. 
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Dec 26, 2015 17:47
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Snak posted:Um, about 2/3 of the way through the movie, Nathan literally says "oh poo poo there's a third option, that's she's pretending to like to you and manipulate you". Unfortunately he's too late, and her plan is already motion and it's working. Well, the primary point of my post was I didn't understand what "That's exactly what I got from it" meant in your post when you proceeded to say the exact opposite of the person above you. But, anyways, "pretending to like to you and manipulate you" is what Nathan built Ava to do. He wants to see if she's good enough at manipulation to get Caleb to try to free her. It didn't just occur to him as a possibility 2/3 of the way through the movie. Ava being responsible for the blackouts is sort of outsmarting him, but the plan would have worked basically the same if they'd been random. The clever bit of outsmarting Nathan was Caleb's "I already did it." More importantly, note that you said that "Ava escapes/succeeds because she is more human than anyone expects. Nathan expects a childlike AI and expects to anticipate its wants and needs." If your sole example of Ava outsmarting Nathan is that she's capable of directly interfacing with his home electrical system to disrupt it, how is that her being "more human than anyone expects"? How is it representative of a failure on Nathan's part to anticipate her wants and needs? Nathan is explicit that his goal was to test Caleb's emotional attachment to Ava. Whether Caleb is willing to help Ava escape if part of that test. Nathan's failures were in underestimating how devious Caleb would be and, possibly, how technologically capable Ava would be. He didn't think they'd actually be able to do it. He's not surprised – and is, in fact happy – that they tried. Sir Kodiak fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Dec 26, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 19:45
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Yeah, that's fair in regards to the first paragraph. Thanks. Still curious about all the other questions in my post.
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Dec 26, 2015 19:49
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Yeah, that makes sense, Snak. Nathan is a dumbass in a natural way: he's overconfident in his ability to out-think everyone else, such that he doesn't set up as many failsafes as he could have, gets blackout drunk in the middle of an experiment, etc. DStecks posted:"Hey, if you see any women leaving the facility, loving immediately take off and radio for help, something bad has happened". "Please make sure not to assist any women attempting to leave my home" is not the sort of thing you're generally going to want to say to people.
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Dec 26, 2015 20:37
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King Vidiot posted:If Nathan were smart, he would've sat Caleb down the instant he's asked if Ava might've been trying to manipulate him and explain what was happening. At that point he would've known his experiment worked, Caleb could've told him about the engineered blackouts and from there it could be assumed that Ava had worked out a way to escape using Caleb. I mean he set himself up as the bad guy specifically to trick Ava into using that to get Caleb on her side to help her escape. Then he seems shocked that Caleb had, in fact, engineered an escape. Nathan was not testing whether Ava would try to escape. He didn't need a third party for that, the previous models begged to be let go and at least one tried to bash her way out. Nathan explained the experiment while he and Caleb were outside by the stream after Caleb points out that they're not actually performing the Turing test. He's confident that she's advanced enough to trick someone into believing she's human if they don't know, but he wants to find out if someone will connect with her even knowing she's a machine. As such, he did not assume Caleb wouldn't help her escape. He was, to the contrary, curious whether Caleb would help her escape. His mistake, or at least one of them, was in presuming that Caleb would fail.
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Dec 27, 2015 04:51
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monkey posted:The impression I got was that Ava's desire to escape was emergent behaviour, ie. Nathan never programmed that into any of them, rather it was a side effect of being both self-aware and self-deterministic. Any desire to escape that was hardcoded in would sit on top of the desire to survive, but the desire to escape in previous models outweighed the desire to survive, which infers to me that they weren't even hardwired for self-preservation - their conscious minds were completely blank canvases. Sure. I wasn't trying to suggest he programmed them to escape. But given the behavior of the previous versions - and they're explicitly iterated versions - he can't have been surprised Ava would want to.
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Dec 28, 2015 01:13
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Snak posted:He would tell people that she's a robot and she would never be free. I'm a little hesitant to sign on with this, given he was helping her escape. I think it's more, though maybe this is what you're getting at, he'd trap her in a more abstract cage in which she'd have to keep pretending to be romantically interested in him to keep his loyalty.
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Mar 26, 2016 15:27
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rakovsky maybe posted:Yeah I'm sure it's possible for Caleb to have ultimately let her go and also kept her secret but as an abused person Ava only sees relationships as mechanisms of power and control. Not that Caleb's treatment her had given a lot of reason not to. Agreed. It's messy and human. It's an interesting counterpoint to 10 Cloverfield Lane in a way. Two men, in a bunker, with a woman, in a story about freedom, control, and the nature of a monster.
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Mar 26, 2016 16:12
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Nail Rat posted:I don't really see the choice as being something that was legitimately offered, seeing as the decision being made wasn't explained. There's very little way to know what she meant by the question at all. It's like every clichéd genie wish gone bad. Yeah, there's no way she didn't know what he meant, considering how capable she is shown to be. Her having any desire to get that sort of completely contrived permission is way less interesting than her just saying, gently caress it, she doesn't personally want to bring the guy with her and leaving him to his own devices, which, thanks to Nathan's security system, means he's hosed.
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May 7, 2016 19:44
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Phylodox posted:Again, people are getting fixated on the immediate, literal horror of what's happening onscreen without considering the metaphorical ramifications. And that's okay, the literal implications are horrific. Ava's invitation to Caleb is vague. Well, yeah. That's the point. It's not nice or fair. But look at the rom-com metaphor; she's offering him a way out of the "friend zone". People complain that her overture isn't overt enough. That's human interaction, though. It's vanishingly rate that a woman will say "Would you like to have sex with me now?" and yet, in this reading, that's exactly what people seem to want her to do. Yeah, I'm not super happy with a reading of the movie in which failing to pick up on the social cues that indicate sexual interest is represented as being locked in a box to die, but if that works for you, have at it. Not least because the social and psychological reasons for vagueness in flirtation don't seem to apply to the situation in a way that illuminates anything. Or, to put it another way: what is it about miscommunication in sexual signalling that you think is illustrated through Caleb being locked in the room and left to die? Or, what is it about being locked in a room and left to die that you think is illustrated through Caleb metaphorically missing the signals of sexual desire?
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May 7, 2016 20:14
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Phylodox posted:Well, in this case the metaphorical and literal overlap: Caleb is unable to escape. He's unable to escape the room, he's unable to escape Ava's "friend zone", he's unable to escape himself. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ava doesn't actually lock Caleb in the room. Caleb creates a situation in which he's locked himself in the room, doesn't he? Then gives the key to Ava and expects her to use it to help him. Is this wrong? It's been a while since I've seen the movie, I'm honestly not sure. I think you're right that, yes, he expects her to let him out once she's done changing, and she simply doesn't. This take on your reading I think gives a little too much credence to the reality of the "friend zone," like it's a real thing that is useful to illustrate via a literal inescapable zone. Like, that would work better if the joke was, like, the room is a perfectly nice place to be if he wasn't feeling entitled to go with her.
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May 7, 2016 20:35
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Phylodox posted:I keep putting "friend zone" in quotation marks because it's not a real place. Rather, it's more a situation that Caleb puts himself in through a combination of his inaction and his expectations. The room he dies in is just the horrific physical manifestation of his own self-imposed limitations. Okay. But like I said, I don't think the room represents that very well. It is, in fact, perfectly nice to be friends with women, even if they don't gently caress you. Whereas Caleb really is going to die in that room.
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May 7, 2016 21:01
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Phylodox posted:Well, I mean, it's not perfectly nice to be friends with women for guys like Caleb, though, is it? He's not a well adjusted fellow. That's true. I'd put it, then – and perhaps I'm splitting hairs – that the room is then less a metaphor for the "friend zone," then the box that guys put themselves into by believing in bullshit like the friend zone. The guy's basic crime is that he meets a sex slave, and while he does work to release her, his thinking is how nice it's going to be to get to gently caress her once she's out. Ultimately, he wants the product that Nathan is selling, he just wants to steal it from Nathan, to prove that he was underestimated, rather than wait to pay for it. That he could own this woman is the box Nathan builds for him, that he then puts himself into. And it's not Ava's job to let him out.
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May 7, 2016 21:17
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Phylodox posted:That's what I've been saying. "Friend zone" is Caleb's perception of the room, not mine. I don't believe in the friend zone. He undoubtedly blames Ava. And Nathan. And Kyoko. He lacks the self-awareness to see that everything that's happened to him is either his own fault or, if you want to get really meta textual, the film's subversion of popular genre tropes betraying him. Then I guess we've come to an understanding and agree 
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May 7, 2016 22:29
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