DVD reviews 299

knowledge of the ‘future’. Edge of Tomorrow, in this sense, could be considered

the best representation of contemporary gaming. This comparison also
accounts for the aforementioned narrow perspective maintained throughout
the film. If viewed then not as a primarily science-fictional film, but as a
video game adaptation, the loose scientific explanations and the painfully
one-dimensional characters might be more easily excused – though this would
imply that sf games do not have to be as rigorous, critical and smart as sf
films might be expected to be, an easily debatable notion.
In conclusion, at face value Edge of Tomorrow appears to be merely a
highly derivative summer action film, but a closer look reveals its missed
potential for deeper critical explorations not only for the world it builds but
for the characters it is so individualistically invested in. Moreover, it seems
too preoccupied with pandering to a selective group of viewers – gamers
and casual sf fans – which raises questions about current trends in genre
expectation and audience perceptions (or at least what filmmakers think those
perceptions are). On the other hand, even if it does not quite hit the possibilities
such an sf film promises, on a purely narrative level it achieves its goal of
depicting compelling characters and highlighting an individual’s capacity for
radical change (internal and external), which can be compared with similar
arguments about individual choice and impact in other sf narratives as well
as the clash between self-preservation and altruism – suggesting, if not openly
addressing, serious questions about what it means to be human.

Ex Machina (Alex Garland UK 2015). DNA Films/Film4. Region 2. Widescreen

2.35:1. £11.99.
Nick Jones

A sharp thriller about artificial intelligence, Ex Machina is written and directed

by Alex Garland. Although radically unlike Garland’s recent work writing and
producing the excellent action film Dredd (Travis UK/US/India/South Africa
2012), Ex Machina’s small cast, pessimistic philosophy and third-act drift into
violent revenge clearly recall his earlier work scripting Danny Boyle’s 28 Days
Later… (UK 2002) and Sunshine (UK/US 2007). Garland’s writing is often
marked by a disquieting tension between traditional dramatic models and the
allure of formless chaos, so his tightly calibrated script here is a surprise, as is
his subdued, intense eye for detail as a director. On one level the film explores
the issues and ethics of artificial life – subjects also at the heart of Kazuo
300 DVD reviews

Ishaguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go (UK/US), which Garland adapted for
Mark Romanek’s direction in 2010. More interestingly, Ex Machina takes aim
at a kind of masculinised digital narcissism in which technological innovation
allows for the indulgence of limitless self-absorption. The film’s narrative may
take place in a vacuum (four characters, a single location), but its ideas are
expansive.
We begin with the wispy Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson), a coder for the very
Google-esque tech company Blue Book, as he apparently wins a competition to
spend a week with the genius CEO of the company. This opening scene, with
its droning music and absence of diegetic sound, establishes the cultural terrain
the film will worry at – Caleb’s first instinct upon hearing the good news is not
to remove his headphones and tell the various people physically around him,
but to post about his accomplishment on social media and scroll through the
dozens of instant reactions. After this, he is swiftly taken to meet the bearded,
bear-like Nathan (Oscar Isaac) in his absurdly isolated house-cum-retreat-
cum-science-lab. Here he discovers his trip has a specific, secret purpose,
namely to determine whether Nathan’s new robot Ava (Alicia Vikander) can
fool a loosely defined, somewhat modified Turing test and thereby stand as
the first example of ‘true’ AI. Ava has a beautiful, lifelike face thanks to her
synthetic skin, but most of the rest of her feminine body is see-through (panels
of silver-grey neoprene mesh around her chest and waist imply private parts
through their coy concealment). She lives in a windowless room, has never
been outside and seems initially to accept her situation as would a child. Across
numerous sessions, all introduced with onscreen titles, Caleb and Ava verbally
feel one another out. Rigorously monitored by Nathan, they nonetheless soon
form an alliance of sorts against him, Caleb’s allegiance shifting from man
to machine as he learns that Ava’s creator intends to treat her as a redundant
prototype even if she does pass the test and prove to be a conscious, living being.
Garland has described the film as taking place ‘ten minutes from now’, and
he explicitly grounds the sf in contemporary technology. Nathan describes
to Caleb how Ava’s gel-based and clearly human-sized brain was generated
through the harvesting of search-engine metadata – we are told 94 per cent
of the world’s queries are processed by Blue Book, meaning it offers not only a
window onto what people are thinking but how they are thinking. Nathan also
hijacked the video and audio feeds of every cell phone camera and microphone
in the world to teach his creation facial and vocal expressivity. These revelations
suggest that global connectivity has in effect created something of its own
artificial intelligence, a Hobbesian Leviathan that mirrors but also stands apart
from us, and in which every Google search and Facebook post is the firing of
 DVD reviews 301

a neuron. Ava’s childlike simplicity might seem at odds with this totalisation
of wired human activity, especially when compared to the radical rethinking
of human agency engendered by the similarly expanded consciousnesses of
Transcendence (Pfister UK/China/US 2014) and Lucy (Besson France 2014).
But, as we find out eventually, Ava’s beguiling damsel-in-distress routine is
something of a means to an end.
While Ex Machina may hint at the utopianism of global technological
communication – its ability to foster cooperation and enrich communal ways
of being – it admits in its third act that this is not quite how the Internet is used
on a daily basis. Nathan may be working towards artificial intelligence, but
he’s also making sex toys: Ava is the latest in a long line of robotic slaves he’s
built and imprisoned. The preceding model, mute housemaid Kyoko (Sonoyo
Mizuno), pleasures Nathan on command, while other half-built prototypes fill
mirrored cupboards in his bedroom, like Bluebeard’s dead wives (or, perhaps
more pertinently, like the pieces of female anatomy American Psycho’s Patrick
Bateman keeps around the house). This aspect of the film has opened Ex
Machina up to feminist critique, depicting as it does the literal objectification
of women and equating them with unfathomable artificial beings. However,
while any treatise on the creation of artificial life marginalises women –
fictions from Frankenstein to Jurassic Park (Spielberg US 1993) simultaneously
make procreation a scientific, male pursuit and revel in the apparent dangers
of such hubris – Ex Machina explores what might happen to gender relations
under such conditions, and indeed what has happened to objectification in an
era of cyberculture. The robots here are purely recreational: they cannot bear
children, and Ava’s predecessor cannot even speak. Nathan even eventually
reveals that he designed Ava’s face based specifically on the kind of Internet
pornography Caleb himself watches (‘Hey, if a search engine’s good for
anything, right?’ Nathan chuckles). In this way the film admits the misogyny
of existing digital culture and extrapolates a chilling vision of emotionally
stunted males who need not worry about relating to others since they can
always find solace in their computers. Though it equates women with machines
(as, in fact, did Alan Turing’s original test), Ex Machina does so in order to
critique this equation and how it has been fostered by the masculine culture
Nathan and Caleb represent.
This, then, is a darker, more pessimistic vision of human–synthetic
relationships than Spike Jonze’s mellow Her (US 2013). In its story of the
burgeoning love between a divorcé and a sultry-voiced operating system
Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), that film presented an ultimately familiar
relationship, albeit one with an unorthodox participant. For all the references
302 DVD reviews

to Samantha’s immense intelligence, Her envisions the arrival of techno-

logical singularity – the point at which machines outrace our capacity to
control or understand them, and beyond which pretty much anything is
possible – as melancholic but benign: the tool says a compassionate farewell
to the hand that formerly grasped it and absconds with hundreds of other
tools to an immaterial realm of quantum possibility. Not so in Ex Machina.
Ava’s whispered, unheard words to Kyoko before they murder Nathan ask us
to imagine what our abused, exploited devices might do if they could start
talking amongst themselves. Even our ostensible hero gets his comeuppance,
Caleb rudely discovering that Ava was only leading him on so that she could
secure her escape. Imprisoned in Nathan’s house at the film’s twist end, Caleb
swaps roles with Ava, yet we do not feel much sympathy. Just because he
convinced himself that Ava has a soul doesn’t mean his desire to have her
for himself was any less base than Nathan’s.
Ex Machina thus provides an intriguing counter-argument to Steven
Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (US 2001), from which Garland lifts his
visual theme of mirrors and reflections. In that film robots are again produced
by a society desperate for automated, on-demand affection, whether in the
form of a child programmed to emotionally love its mother for eternity or a
gigolo programmed to physically love a customer for as long as the cost of a
session. Spielberg’s creations – initially imagined by Stanley Kubrick before
his death – are products of the same narcissistic techno-culture as Ava, even if
they notably lack her capacity for duplicity. A.I.’s mechas live in a twenty-first
century on the brink of ecological disaster, which by the film’s third act (‘two
thousand years later’) has finally occurred. On a now-dead Earth, advanced
robots sift through rubble looking for vestiges of lost humanity, where they
think they might find the meaning of existence. Unlike Ava, they cannot
break their programming, and are still imprinted on their (long-dead) human
inventors. Perhaps this is what we want from our creations – undying, selfless
loyalty that screams its infinite fidelity into the void, a distorted mirror of our
own relentless capacity for self-love. Ava shows us something else: a calculating
desire for self-determination, a ferocious will to define the parameters of one’s
own programming.
If Ex Machina’s depiction of nonhuman life resembles any recent sf film, it
isn’t the operating system of Her, the pet-like machines of Automata (Ibáñez
Bulgaria/US/Spain/Canada 2014) or the viral digital brain of Transcendence.
Rather, it is the alien dressing itself as Scarlett Johansson in Under the
Skin (Glazer UK/US/Switzerland 2013), another film that poses seductive
femininity as a superficial guise. Both films end with odd passages in which the
 DVD reviews 303

protagonist intermingles dressing and undressing, concealment and exposure.

These sequences nihilistically refute our ability to get ‘under the skin’ – to truly
know another person or even ourselves. At issue is the ethical recognition of
others that arises from consciousness of the self. Johansson’s alien looks for this
in her own face as she holds the mask of it in her obsidian hands; Ava reveals
how she has used it as a feint to fool Caleb and get her own way, a strategy that
ironically proves her own capacity for self-actualisation. If in Ex Machina’s
last moments Ava appropriates traditional emblems of femininity (long hair,
a white dress, immaculate skin), at least she does so on her own terms after
savagely marginalising the two bullying men in her life. The film’s consistent
visual contrast of the coldly artificial and the organically natural – exemplified
in the architecture of Nathan’s house and an early close-up of a knife slicing
through salmon – remains unresolved. We are acutely aware that Ava is still
a machine, and moreover one capable of fierce self-defence. Her escape into
the world should prompt us to ask ourselves whether there might already be
Avas in our midst, and if so whether they will ever forgive us for how we have
treated them.

Home (Tim Johnson US 2015). 20th Century Fox DVD 2015. Region 1. 1.85:1.
Widescreen. US$9.99.
Walter Metz

In Salman Rushdie’s elegant 1992 book about The Wizard of Oz (Fleming US

1939), the postcolonial author and intellectual argues that the MGM Technicolor
extravaganza is in fact an allegory for the postcolonial subject. Dorothy is so
desirous of leaving Kansas to travel over the rainbow, but once she’s there
she immediately wants to go home again. Like Dorothy, Rushdie is neither at
peace in his birthplace, Bombay, India, nor in hyper-industrial, urban New
York City, where he now lives. Like The Wizard of Oz, the newest animated
feature from Dreamworks Animation, Home can similarly be investigated via
the frame of the postcolonial. In particular, Home invokes the film La Noire
de… (Black Girl), a 1966 Senegalese film directed by Ousmane Sembene and
the first sub-Saharan African film to make a splash on the international film
market, as both films interrogate the nature of colonialism from the point of
view of the colonised.
Home begins with an alien race, the Boov, fleeing their enemy, the Gorgs.
The Boov are a cowardly race, choosing to run away rather than fight, and so
About the contributors
Gerry Canavan is an assistant professor of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature
at Marquette University. His monograph, Modern Masters of Science Fiction: Octavia
E. Butler, is forthcoming in 2016.
Taylor Evans is a PhD student at the University of California, Riverside, studying
American literature, sf, technoculture and race theory. His research focuses on the way
technoculture theorises race, and his thesis looks specifically at issues of white supremacy
in American sf.
Leimar Garcia-Siino has just completed a PhD at the University of Liverpool, having
researched fantasy, metafiction, metafantasy and the works of Neil Gaiman. She is one of
the organisers of the Current Research in Speculative Fiction (CRSF) annual international
conference and the media review editor for the SFRA Review.
Craig Haslop is a lecturer in media at the University of Liverpool. He is currently writing
a book investigating the queerness of ‘cult’ television and is researching television and
film representations of the intersectionality between working-class and queer identities.
Dan Hassler-Forest is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Cultural
Studies at Utrecht University. He has published books and articles on comics, transmedia
storytelling, superhero movies, critical theory and fantastic world-building.
David M. Higgins teaches literature and composition at Inver Hills College in Minnesota,
and he is the Speculative Fiction Editor for The Los Angeles Review of Books. He writes
about twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature and culture, and his
research explores imperial fantasies during the Cold War period and beyond. His article
‘Toward a Cosmopolitan Science Fiction’ (published in the June 2011 issue of American
Literature) won the 2012 SFRA Pioneer Award for excellence in scholarship.
Ayana Jamieson is the founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network (@oeblegacy).
She is a lecturer at SUNY, Empire State College and teaches interdisciplinary courses on
comparative cultural mythologies and speculative fiction.
Nick Jones is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Film Studies Department at
Queen Mary University of London, where he is researching the distinctive aesthetics of
digital 3D cinema. He is the author of Hollywood Action Films and Spatial Theory (2015)
and his work has appeared in Cinema Journal, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal
and New Review of Film and Television Studies.
Lorna Jowett is a Reader in Television Studies at the University of Northampton, where
she teaches some of her favourite things, including horror, sf and television, sometimes all
at once. She is co-author with Stacey Abbott of TV Horror: Investigating The Dark Side of
the Small Screen (2013), author of Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy
Fan (2005) and editor of the forthcoming collection Time on TV.

Science Fiction Film and Television 9.2 (2016), 315–17 ISSN 1754-3770 (print)  1754-3789 (online)
© Liverpool University Press doi:10.3828/sfftv.2016.9.7
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.