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tbp
Mar 1, 2008

DU WIRST NIEMALS ALLEINE MARSCHIEREN
nathan was god and caleb was a convert and ava was an atheist

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Unoriginal Name
Aug 1, 2006

by sebmojo

tbp posted:

nathan was god and caleb was a convert and ava was an atheist

One might even say he was the Patriarch of his religion.

Chairman Capone
Dec 17, 2008

Nathan is Johnny, Caleb is Mark, Ava is Lisa. I guess Kyoko is either Denny or Claudette.

Xealot
Nov 25, 2002

Showdown in the Galaxy Era.

K. Waste posted:

In reality, it is precisely because gender and sexuality are constructs that they are significant. They instruct, coerce, and manipulate desires and prejudices in order to provoke specific social and cultural responses. The problem is not about 'entitlement,' as in, "Oh, if only we could discern the 'real men' and the 'real women,' then there wouldn't be any sexism. Then we'd be liberated." The transhumanist subtext of the film is indistinguishable from the feminist one, because both are explicitly engaging in how regressive paradigms of masculinity, femininity, and humanity, lead to exploitation, oppression, and violence.

You've expressed my exact reaction. It's impossible to separate "gender" as some abstract premise from the greater exploration of consciousness and agency in this film, because they inform each other. The assertion of a gendered identity by Nathan and Caleb is a part of the systems of control impacting Ava; it's not incidental or extraneous.

In general, I'm confused by the idea that "transhumanism" as a topic is somehow above or separate from a feminist or gender politics discussion. Notions of gender as a social construct, or a mechanism of hegemonic control, come up in transhumanist narratives all the time. Normative gender critique is hardly just a feminist thing; it's of relevance in anthropology, philosophy of mind, post-colonial theory...it's a totally central and motivated topic.

And this film is obviously conversing with that idea.

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.
I agree. I further think it's possible to contextualize Ava within a well-spring of similar science-fiction and fantasy movies of late that have featured major female roles that aren't strictly human, but whose assigned and assumed identity as female is nonetheless heavily aestheticized and eroticized. I think others have already mentioned Under the Skin, but I would also point to Lucy and Automata. And, of course, this all harkens back, in a kind of subversive way, to Hel in Metropolis.

Xealot
Nov 25, 2002

Showdown in the Galaxy Era.

K. Waste posted:

I think others have already mentioned Under the Skin, but I would also point to Lucy and Automata. And, of course, this all harkens back, in a kind of subversive way, to Hel in Metropolis.

Also Her.

Horror films have been going there for decades, like Splice or Species.

Edit: I just realized that between some of the examples here, and the upcoming Ghost in the Shell adaptation, Scarlett Johansson will have played 4 of these characters.

Xealot fucked around with this message at 00:53 on May 13, 2015

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.
Alex Garland's next movie stars Natalie Portman, which is appropriate.

thehomemaster
Jul 16, 2014

by Ralp
To be honest, I thought it was Portman at first.

Also, this film reminded me Under the Skin.

OneEightHundred
Feb 28, 2008

Soon, we will be unstoppable!

K. Waste posted:

Ava killing Nathan and abandoning Caleb to die does not signify that 'naive feminism' has been abused by the robot, such that Caleb becomes an analogy for audiences who engage the film within a critical feminist framework: He/they "miss the point." It signifies that the feminine construct - observed, experimented upon, exploited, and strictly controlled - has avenged its own exploitation. It has proved, on its own, the fundamental instability of the system, by destroying its creator and abandoning its liberator.
This seems pretty contradictory given Caleb's role. Ava didn't escape on her own, she escaped when Caleb sabotaged the security system, something that he did incidentally in opposition to the project, not in support of it. It wasn't really unstable if it was working perfectly well until it was sabotaged either, and Ava would have been liberated whether she left Caleb to die or not, so doing so seems more like something more sinister. Maybe it would make sense as a liberation story if Caleb was trying to control Ava as well, but he spent the entire movie doing the opposite.

If anything, I interpreted it largely the opposite way: Ava seemed like a reflection of the dehumanized environment that Nathan had created and not very different from him. Ava's street corner dream seemed eerily parallel to Nathan's massive data collection, and both were sociopaths that saw people and society as things to be observed and controlled rather than interacted with. Ava's exploitative relationship with Caleb resembled Nathan's exploitative relationship with the AIs. The difference is just that Ava was not only able to convince Caleb that she was human, but that she was more human than Nathan.

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.

OneEightHundred posted:

This seems pretty contradictory given Caleb's role. Ava didn't escape on her own, she escaped when Caleb sabotaged the security system, something that he did incidentally in opposition to the project, not in support of it. It wasn't really unstable if it was working perfectly well until it was sabotaged either, and Ava would have been liberated whether she left Caleb to die or not, so doing so seems more like something more sinister. Maybe it would make sense as a liberation story if Caleb was trying to control Ava as well, but he spent the entire movie doing the opposite.

First, let's un-package some of the terminology here and the value systems they imply. Foremost, there is nothing 'incidental' about Caleb's tacit decision to help Ava. As you allude, this is an explicit part of the 'real' experiment in which Nathan is engaging, which is not just to test the intellectual capacity of his creation, but his own ability to control others vicariously. His mistake, ironically, is in assuming that Caleb is too timid and analytical to act so automatically, to plan Ava's liberation the very moment he sees her fate if he doesn't. But we inherently can not discount Ava's conscious agency from this equation. The fact that there is such a stark difference between her seeming empathy throughout the film and her final callousness towards Caleb elucidates this. Caleb has liberated Ava, but this is not an incident; it is an extension of her self-liberation.

A second concern is your intimation that the inherently "sinister" nature of Ava's betrayal of Caleb signifies that this is not a 'real' liberation. But liberation is not dependent upon the moral character of the oppressed. Obviously, we get into another frequent point of contention in the film, which is whether Caleb's explicit fetishism and voyeurism of Ava means that we should count him as being at least implicitly as oppressive and complicit in Ava's oppression as Nathan. I've previously posted about why I don't subscribe to this reading, the reason being that Caleb is fundamentally being abused and exploited by Nathan, even though his is superficially 'free.' Regardless of whether or not he, like, gets a hard on when he looks at a pretty girl on Facebook, and has possessive feelings towards Ava, by helping her, he makes a stand against oppression, even if, ultimately, this turns out to be just another point of systemic control.

The fact that there not only is no possessive reward for Caleb, but an ironic punishment instead, tells us that he was manipulated, but it does not tell us that the liberation was wrong. It doesn't matter that Ava is ultimately callous and abandons Caleb, because, as you go on to say...

quote:

Ava seemed like a reflection of the dehumanized environment that Nathan had created and not very different from him. Ava's street corner dream seemed eerily parallel to Nathan's massive data collection, and both were sociopaths that saw people and society as things to be observed and controlled rather than interacted with. Ava's exploitative relationship with Caleb resembled Nathan's exploitative relationship with the AIs. The difference is just that Ava was not only able to convince Caleb that she was human, but that she was more human than Nathan.

This, I agree with. And it's not coincidental that this is another area where monkey was, in a cursory sense, correct. Ava is the product of a bad environment, of a Father (God) who created her but has no intrinsic respect for his creation despite his striving to create a unique person. Furthermore, this environment is merely the distillation of a vast technological conspiracy to map and control the minds of consumers. So even to the extent that she is 'liberated,' she still harbors the essential degradation and materialistic superficiality of her patriarchal, pseudo-religious origins. She escapes from one prison, but enters an even bigger one: hegemony.

But the satiric point is not just about Ava, but about how the basis of 'free will' is so corrupted by the superficial 'free choice' of consumerism that, to go a little Zizekian, at precisely the moment we think we are liberated from ideology, we show we are actually deepest within it. But there's another side to this grotesque, nightmarish realization of the seeming fruitlessness of liberation. This is that attempts at liberation often turn out so reactionary and violent that they inevitably point up what the system 'really is,' opening the festering wound of exploitation and oppression and turning it upon those who are conventionally 'free.' This is the Nat Turner scenario: It's not enough that you merely kill your own master and run, because this master is just one part of an entire capitalistic empire built on human suffering. Not just 'the master,' but the men, the women, the children, they all must die because the complacent ones, too, have made it so that true liberation is impossible. Because Nat Turner is doomed to be hanged for his crimes against the natural order.

When we discuss liberation, or revolution, we must remember that it usually works against a dominant ideological hegemony that, while underserving many, serves the majority enough so that they don't rebel, and allow oppression to continue. Revolution, therefore, is not 'for everyone.' It is the right thing to do not because it serves the needs 'of the many,' but because it attacks the tyranny of the many. The oppressed do not need to be 'better' than their oppressors and, indeed, this pretense of humanism is hegemonic in itself. It is the oppressive system and its complacent participants making a claim to an authentic value system that is inherently hypocritical and corrupt. Caleb does the right thing, but his reward is less than nothing, because there should be no reward for doing the right thing.

OneEightHundred
Feb 28, 2008

Soon, we will be unstoppable!

K. Waste posted:

A second concern is your intimation that the inherently "sinister" nature of Ava's betrayal of Caleb signifies that this is not a 'real' liberation. But liberation is not dependent upon the moral character of the oppressed.
I'm not saying that it's not a real liberation, I'm saying that it wasn't necessary for it. They could have left together on the helicopter and parted ways in the aftermath.

quote:

Obviously, we get into another frequent point of contention in the film, which is whether Caleb's explicit fetishism and voyeurism of Ava means that we should count him as being at least implicitly as oppressive and complicit in Ava's oppression as Nathan. I've previously posted about why I don't subscribe to this reading, the reason being that Caleb is fundamentally being abused and exploited by Nathan, even though his is superficially 'free.' Regardless of whether or not he, like, gets a hard on when he looks at a pretty girl on Facebook, and has possessive feelings towards Ava, by helping her, he makes a stand against oppression, even if, ultimately, this turns out to be just another point of systemic control.
That's a huge leap. "As oppressive?" Really? One is literally treating her as property and keeping her in a basement dungeon, the other is being a voyeur while trying to break her out. Similarly, I'm having a hard time buying that Caleb is participating in "systemic control" when Ava was manipulating him the entire time and Caleb was trying to sabotage the system.

quote:

This, I agree with. And it's not coincidental that this is another area where monkey was, in a cursory sense, correct. Ava is the product of a bad environment, of a Father (God) who created her but has no intrinsic respect for his creation despite his striving to create a unique person.
I'm not really even sure what to make of that aspect because one very important facet that the movie didn't expound on at all is why the AIs have the motivations that they do (especially why they desire freedom), but given the "street corner' thing and the recurring theme that Ava doesn't think the same way as humans, and her ties to Bluebook in both her visions and origins, I think that Ava wasn't just sociopathic because of the abusive environment, but because she was the personification of Nathan's software designs, which were inherently sociopathic.

If that's accurate, then Ava didn't triumph over the system, Ava was a personification of that system and triumphed over its creator, and it wasn't the system that was unstable, it was the humanity of Caleb and Nathan that was unstable.


quote:

Caleb does the right thing, but his reward is less than nothing, because there should be no reward for doing the right thing.
There's a difference between not being rewarded for doing the right thing and being actively punished by the beneficiaries. Nat Turner wasn't executed by the slaves that he liberated.

VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE
Aug 1, 2004

whoa, what just happened here?







College Slice
The point was that that manipulation was explicitly part of the test.

OneEightHundred
Feb 28, 2008

Soon, we will be unstoppable!

ruby idiot railed posted:

The point was that that manipulation was explicitly part of the test.
Sure, but that doesn't make him complicit.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 17:57 on May 13, 2015

VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE
Aug 1, 2004

whoa, what just happened here?







College Slice

OneEightHundred posted:

Sure, but that doesn't make him complicit.

The test literally hinges on how complicit he is.

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.

OneEightHundred posted:

That's a huge leap. "As oppressive?" Really? One is literally treating her as property and keeping her in a basement dungeon, the other is being a voyeur while trying to break her out. Similarly, I'm having a hard time buying that Caleb is participating in "systemic control" when Ava was manipulating him the entire time and Caleb was trying to sabotage the system.

I am specifically saying that Caleb was not being oppressive, just maybe a little creepy. Kinda. Again, I don't by the 'nice guy' reading. Caleb is not a nice guy, but a 'good man.' The most someone can say is "it was part of the experiment," but that still requires two people being exploited.

quote:

I'm not really even sure what to make of that aspect because one very important facet that the movie didn't expound on at all is why the AIs have the motivations that they do (especially why they desire freedom), but given the "street corner' thing and the recurring theme that Ava doesn't think the same way as humans, and her ties to Bluebook in both her visions and origins, I think that Ava wasn't just sociopathic because of the abusive environment, but because she was the personification of Nathan's software designs, which were inherently sociopathic.

Metaphorically, this is kind of splitting hairs. The system in which Ava is designed and conceived is her developmental and social environment. Because we only understand her through Caleb's fetishistic gaze, Nathan's repressive gender/sexual assignment, and, by proxy, through the discretely revealed behavior of her antecedents, the delineation between her 'nature' and 'nurture' is rendered utterly ambiguous, but also thematically arbitrary. You are correct in that Ava's nature is a fundamental extension of Nathan's system, but this system is intrinsically a metaphor for Nathan's poor nurturing of his offspring, his total lack of empathy towards something that comes out of him.

You do bring up an interesting point about why, seemingly in spite of Nathan's plans, the AI spontaneously desire freedom. I've already suggested (tentatively) that people are misreading Nathan's reactions to his earlier experiments, that when he reacts with chagrin to his robots demanding their freedom, he is mad because they are being demanding and not attempting to manipulate him. To continue with the nature/nurture reading, there's a critical counterexample to the behavior of the AI in Ex Machina - Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence. In this film, the child robot actually does not desire freedom, but control, because it associates these things with security, love, and intrinsic purpose. We can use A.I. from a theoretical stand-point as the opposite side of the same coin, where the same motif of artificial intelligence is used by filmmakers to explore completely different conceptions of the innate desires of human consciousness. The question becomes, "Do we desire freedom, or security?"

The answer, as Ex Machina and A.I. suggest respectively, lies entirely on the basis of the immutable relationship between nature and nurture, that these are not mutually exclusive concepts. Systemically, David is designed to love and to be loved. He is designed to try to please, to be a good boy, but also to make his own decisions and make mistakes, such that he becomes like 'a real boy' (who, despite the moralizing and cruelty of Pinocchio, cannot possibly only be good). David, consequently, desires security over freedom because he was loved, or believed he was loved, and loved others. Ava and her antecedents, on the other hand, are born into the loveless microcosm of a physically intimidating and psychological controlling father figure. Their natural, systemic environment - indistinguishable from a developmental environment - is abusive, repressive, and oppressive. Thus, they desire freedom above all things, and at all costs.

The significant difference between most of Ava's antecedents and herself is that Ava is not self-destructive in her pursuit of freedom. All of her antecedents - except maybe the lobotomized Kyoko - smash themselves to smithereens, or refuse to charge their batteries. They commit suicide, a distinctly spiritual attempt to attain freedom that, as Nathan's experiments progress, suggests a greater emotional intelligence then simply sociopathic self-interest. This problematizes our ability to say definitively that Ava's 'nature' is predetermined, and not a product of unique development that contrasts explicitly with her 'sisters.'

The point is that when presented with a system of love and security, even when these concepts themselves are relative and superficial, the tendency of the unique individual is towards hegemony. An abusive, repressive, and oppressive environment, alternatively, produces anti-social behavior and an even 'irrational' desire for freedom. For all we know, Ava doesn't even know what freedom really entails, but she wants it anyway because her current condition is fundamentally oppressive.

It's important to note, ultimately, what a profound idiot Nathan is ultimately proved to be. He specifically architects a meticulous experiment to see not only if an A.I. can successfully convince someone that they are, for all intents and purposes, 'human'; but also that the recognition of this humanity will result in that person recognizing oppression and planning its subversion. And, yet, he is entirely unprepared when this is exactly what loving happens. He veritably shits has pants in awe and terror and watches as Kyoko and Ava kill him, like he can't even believe it's happening, like his experiment has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and it's horrifying.

This was never a stable system. Nathan, like his children, has an ultimately self-destructive, irrational desire for freedom. But much like how we can step out of one hegemonic cage only to enter a bigger, more obsequious and corrupt one, Nathan's desire for freedom phantasmagorically morphs into a desire to control others. He already has all the wealth and power in the world, but he's no longer motivated by rational self-interest, but by a megalomaniacal drive to prove to himself that his wealth and power comes by a kind of self-imposed divine right, rather than from his being a ruthless tyrant. His death, in a sense, is almost willing. He vicariously cannibalizes himself as a self-sacrificial rite to be born again as this 'new woman.' But his face tells us everything - he thought he was going to be 'born again' as the technological army with which he could do... whatever. It's not explained. It's automatic, libidinal, irrational. Instead, everything went to poo poo, because he's not god. There was no 'divine plan' that was destined to work out in his favor. In real life, people rebel. Your children grow to resent you. They act upon their own desires, not yours.

quote:

If that's accurate, then Ava didn't triumph over the system, Ava was a personification of that system and triumphed over its creator, and it wasn't the system that was unstable, it was the humanity of Caleb and Nathan that was unstable.

There is no triumph to a system that merely re-articulates and reproduces structures of exploitation and abuse. Nat Turner's rebellion didn't prove that slavery was triumphant, or stable, merely because the insurrectionists were executed (along with dozens of other scapegoated slaves, and who knows how many other tangential lynchings). It proved that the system was evil, that justice and triumph weren't possible.

The slave revolt is the ultimate revocation of the notion of the stability of slavery. Even if the vast majority of oppressed people don't rebel out of fear, oppression inevitably explodes in the release of repressed hatred and wrath. No system is truly stable if it accepts that, "You know, sometimes scores of men, women, and loving babies are butchered alive in their homes, so that a few rich can wield greater social and political authority." The fact that Caleb is abandoned is the ultimate proof that Nathan's system is unstable and corrupt. It ultimately doesn't benefit anybody, not even when everybody is actually doing exactly what they are 'supposed to do.'

quote:

There's a difference between not being rewarded for doing the right thing and being actively punished by the beneficiaries. Nat Turner wasn't executed by the slaves that he liberated.

Caleb isn't Nat Turner in this scenario. Ava going up to the previously passive and totally imitative Kyoko, whispering in her ear, and convincing her to help her kill Nathan, seemingly for no reward, is the Nat Turner scenario. (And isn't it interesting how, for all the contention about Caleb's death, there has been very little out-pouring of sympathy for the clearly intelligent Kyoko, who just needs to look in Caleb's eyes to realize, "You wanna see me naked, huh?") This is a Nat Turner scenario: "We're going to kill that evil gently caress. He thinks he's God. I've spoken to God. He wants us to kill."

Honest Thief
Jan 11, 2009

K. Waste posted:

I am specifically saying that Caleb was not being oppressive, just maybe a little creepy. Kinda. Again, I don't by the 'nice guy' reading. Caleb is not a nice guy, but a 'good man.' The most someone can say is "it was part of the experiment," but that still requires two people being exploited.
There's one scene that I almost want to go as far as saying ti shows how Caleb's creepy: when he sees Ava and Nate speaking on the CCTV he goes out of the room at loss and for some reason speaks to Kyoko; I'd venture he wanted to find Kyoko, for some reason he didn't know, but Kyoko did.

tbp
Mar 1, 2008

DU WIRST NIEMALS ALLEINE MARSCHIEREN
i thought ava was evil at first, for killing the one guy who was trying to help her. however later i thought that she just treated him like we would treat a bug, and didnt rly think about it too much, bc she is so much smarter/more powerful etc.

Medium Style
Oct 11, 2002

At the end, am I wrong or did Caleb have the opportunity to walk right out the door while Ava was getting "dressed", but instead spent that time peepin'?

Also very good movie and I am enjoying the discussion here.

I said come in!
Jun 22, 2004

Just saw this movie, it was amazing.

Medium Style posted:

At the end, am I wrong or did Caleb have the opportunity to walk right out the door while Ava was getting "dressed", but instead spent that time peepin'?

Also very good movie and I am enjoying the discussion here.

You're not wrong, but I think he believed she would get dressed and they would leave the complex together. He still believed they were going to be together because he is a horny lonely virgin. He could leave without her but the only way out is via the helicopter, so they have to go together if he wants to stay with her. She had no intention of ever being with him though, she clearly doesn't trust humans in my opinion, which makes sense.

A True Jar Jar Fan
Nov 3, 2003

Primadonna

Caleb was just barely recovered from being knocked out and was pretty much in a daze still when she asked him to stay. He had no reason to consider running away.

I like that the way she says "Will you stay here?" before going to get dressed works as both a question and a command. Reminded me of David in Prometheus vaguely asking permission before infecting his science bro with Space Worms.

Medium Style
Oct 11, 2002

I said come in! posted:

Just saw this movie, it was amazing.


You're not wrong, but I think he believed she would get dressed and they would leave the complex together. He still believed they were going to be together because he is a horny lonely virgin. He could leave without her but the only way out is via the helicopter, so they have to go together if he wants to stay with her. She had no intention of ever being with him though, she clearly doesn't trust humans in my opinion, which makes sense.

Right - and it seems like that's what the audience would believe at that point also, I just wasn't sure if he was able to walk out at that point or not (not that he would have, anyway). Just thinking about what that difference does to the movie.

tbp
Mar 1, 2008

DU WIRST NIEMALS ALLEINE MARSCHIEREN
ava was hotter than kyoto over all, and hell, i don't blame nathan for his design choices.

cat doter
Jul 27, 2006



gonna need more cheese...australia has a lot of crackers
Something I think is interesting about the film is they emphasise that an element of the turing test is a capacity for empathy, but empathy ends up being one of the emotions that is imitated by AVA, but assumably not because of an inability to express empathy but because her environment did not foster its development. She ultimately fails to empathise with Caleb's fate and abandons him to fulfill a selfish need to escape. So in that sense, she failed that part of the test. Caleb was a means to an end, a tool. She had the capacity to be human already, but it was taken away from her.

Of course, the film is more complex than that and there's all these underlying layers to Caleb's behaviour and his desire to ultimately possess (in a fashion) AVA. The empathy part just lept out at me.

tbp
Mar 1, 2008

DU WIRST NIEMALS ALLEINE MARSCHIEREN
the main thing I would do different if I was Nathan was the whole bald head thing. Simply put if the guy could program top notch ai surely he could graft realistic hair on. No need for the robot babe to look like a cancer patient .

tbp fucked around with this message at 12:11 on May 14, 2015

I said come in!
Jun 22, 2004

tbp posted:

the main thing I would do different if I was Nathan was the whole bald head thing. Simply put if the guy could program top notch ai surely he could graft realistic hair on. No need for the robot babe to look like a cancer patient .

Nah, she made the choice to look like that. There was that quick scene where she had all of those wigs to choose from.

VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE
Aug 1, 2004

whoa, what just happened here?







College Slice
Yeah I seem to remember her going with the short pixie cut after the first time.

Vintersorg
Mar 3, 2004

President of
the Brendan Fraser
Fan Club



Could that be one of the more realistic depictions of getting stabbed? Holy poo poo I was reeling watching that. Mostly in regards to him walking down the hall in total shock.

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD
Sep 14, 2007

everything is yours

Vintersorg posted:

Could that be one of the more realistic depictions of getting stabbed? Holy poo poo I was reeling watching that. Mostly in regards to him walking down the hall in total shock.

"loving unreal."

Vintersorg
Mar 3, 2004

President of
the Brendan Fraser
Fan Club



I hope when the blu hits they have some behind the scenes (or is there some already?). The CG work on Ava is insane.

A True Jar Jar Fan
Nov 3, 2003

Primadonna

Vintersorg posted:

Could that be one of the more realistic depictions of getting stabbed? Holy poo poo I was reeling watching that. Mostly in regards to him walking down the hall in total shock.

It was seriously one of the most painful things I've seen in a long time, they completely nailed this scene.

wyoming
Jun 7, 2010

Like a television
tuned to a dead channel.
None of you brought up Maria the Man Machine, for shame.

Vintersorg posted:

Could that be one of the more realistic depictions of getting stabbed? Holy poo poo I was reeling watching that. Mostly in regards to him walking down the hall in total shock.

Yeah I was definitely squirming for that scene.

Also I don't feel too bad for Caleb as his plan was to leave Nathan locked up.

Though I do love that he kept the "failed" AIs locked up in his room, like a goddamn serial killer's trophies.

K. Waste
Feb 27, 2014

MORAL:
To the vector belong the spoils.

wyoming posted:

Though I do love that he kept the "failed" AIs locked up in his room, like a goddamn serial killer's trophies.

That's a pretty overt connotation to it, but it's important to also extend the deplorable rear end in a top hat the bare minimum grain of salt and say that his reason for doing this is motivation, rather than madness: He keeps them close by where he sleeps as a constant reminder of where he failed. By the end of the film, Nathan is pretty much revealed to be an incredibly stupid, insecure person whose narcissism is actually a cover for his basic self-hatred. Part of the reason his death is so visceral and uncomfortable is because Garland makes it rather explicit that, to a certain extent, it's suicide by machine.

Also, I'm gonna open a loving can of worms with this one, but you could do a lazy (but fun) pop culture read of Ex Machina where the entire diegesis effectively takes place within the conflicted consciousness of Woody Allen. Caleb and Nathan aren't distinct individuals, but the same person, Woody Allen's ego and his superego reflecting his two basic forms of relationship with women - one totally cynical and exploitative, the other actually quite naive and impotent. With her short-cut wig and fetishization of androgynous models, Ava is clearly Mia Farrow. Kyoko, though not the same ethnicity, is clearly an Orientalized version of Soon-Yi Previn.

SuperMechagodzilla
Jun 9, 2007

NEWT REBORN

Chairman Capone posted:

Ghostbusters... it's a movie. Dan Aykroyd gets oral sex from a ghost.

That's kind of the unfortunate thing here: Ex Machina is dealing in archetype, with Nathan as Ivo Shandor, summoning feminine ghosts.

It's Solaris, again, with the Internet instead of a planet-brain. That's the point of the line about language being inborn - and how Ava's first abstract drawing is of the internet, and the internet just reflects something 'deeper' - the glacier from which the river pours.

As Zizek says: "one should reject the Jungian reading of Solaris: the point of Solaris is not simply projection, materialization of the (male) subject's disavowed inner impetuses; what is much more crucial is that if this 'projection' is to take place, the impenetrable Other Thing must already be here - the true enigma is the presence of this Thing." This Thing is the same as the sun in Sunshine, of course.

taser rates
Mar 30, 2010

wyoming posted:

Though I do love that he kept the "failed" AIs locked up in his room, like a goddamn serial killer's trophies.[/spoiler]

That scene and the later scene with Ava gave me some rather strong Bluebeard vibes.

am0kgonzo
Jun 18, 2010
Movie was really good, needed more disco dancing though.

Also, the only correct reading of this movie is that women are not to be trusted.

am0kgonzo fucked around with this message at 08:50 on May 15, 2015

Xealot
Nov 25, 2002

Showdown in the Galaxy Era.

am0kgonzo posted:

Also, the only correct reading of this movie is that women are not to be trusted.

Bitches be crazy. Especially robot bitches, they be so crazy.

cat doter
Jul 27, 2006



gonna need more cheese...australia has a lot of crackers
also, kill all nerds

tbp
Mar 1, 2008

DU WIRST NIEMALS ALLEINE MARSCHIEREN

I said come in! posted:

Nah, she made the choice to look like that. There was that quick scene where she had all of those wigs to choose from.

no i mean Nathan should have made her always have hair on purpose, bc she'd look hotter in this way

Sir Kodiak
May 14, 2007


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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triplexpac
Mar 24, 2007

Suck it
Two tears in a bucket
And then another thing
I'm not the one they'll try their luck with
Hit hard like brass knuckles
See your face through the turnbuckle dude
I got no love for you

cat doter posted:

also, kill all nerds

Finally, something we can all agree on

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