As the film is released to a new at-home audience, the actors in Alex Garland’s Ex_Machina are almost as impressive as the awesome visual effects provided by UK company Double Negative
Some actors just seem to be from the future. One such thespian is Dublin-born Domhnall Gleeson who started off in Harry Potter films, but is now the face of ‘near sci-fi’ movies, where the science and technology portrayed are all too believable.
Gleeson stars in the Black Mirror TV series of programmes as Ash in the Be Right Back episode where his character dies in a car crash, but is brought back to life as a ‘being’ based on his social media and online profile.
On the back of that ethereal performance, he starred as the time-travelling hero in Richard Curtis’s About Time and he is currently filming the new Star Wars movie. But the most interesting of all his recent roles is as Caleb in the extraordinary film Ex_Machina.
Ex_Machina tells of a young coder at the world’s ‘biggest internet company’ who wins an internal competition to spend a week with the company’s reclusive CEO Nathan on his sprawling estate in unnamed, but recognisable, North American mountains.
On arrival Caleb realises this is not because he has been chosen as the company’s rising star, but because he is best suited for an experiment in which he meets Ava, a beautiful AI prototype robot girl. Under a Non-Disclosure Agreement, he must then perform a live Turing Test to see whether he can distinguish the machine from a human. I have to stop there, but let’s just say things become very interesting.
If Gleeson is excellent as Caleb, then Alicia Vikander as Ava is sensational and Ex-Machina is one of the most interesting and smart movies released this year. I took my wife to see it and she hates sci-fi movies… but she thought it was amazing. It creates a scenario that will be very familiar within the next two decades and underlines that the most interesting movies being currently made are about the near-future and how it will affect those living now.
Grossing $33 million worldwide, the film is likely to receive a much more deserving and wider audience after its release on Blu-Ray and DVD last week. If ever a film had potential cult status, it is this one. Ava may be one of the first robots, along with the Scarlett Johansson-voiced operating system in the film Her, to possess a sexual charisma that will appeal a certain type of young man.
“The key challenge was to make Ava's AI plausible so that Caleb (and the audience) will be convinced that she is a conscious, self-determining being. But it was all in place in the script. Director Alex Garland had done his research, and studied and absorbed the works of AI expert Professor Murray Shanahan.
“The philosophy and science of consciousness was there on the page, so being a scientific consultant on Ex_Machina was not an arduous task, compared to other movies I’ve worked on. It just needed Alicia Vikander to bring life to Ava, which she does perfectly,” said Adam Rutherford, Science Advisor to Ex_Machina, speaking at the DVD & Blu-ray launch of Ex_Machina.
At a London event last week, Double Negative, the technologists behind Ex_Machina and winners of two Oscars for its visual effects and computer animation work on Inception and Interstellar, went one step further.
Its Virtual Reality team created a VR experience by using a custom built digital spherical stereo camera designed for use with its 3D rendering software. The result allowed the viewer, wearing the Samsung Gear VR headset, to look around the entire hi-res environment and to ‘meet’ Ava using a specialised Android Oculus playback app.
“A key aspect of Ava’s believability as a character was the mix of hard metal and then softer outer skin mesh. Ava’s inner mechanical parts constantly moved as she did. They were all built into a rig where all of the muscles would fire correctly, and then various organs and gyroscopes were added that would just spin throughout.
“The gold mesh was based on air-actuated robot modules which were wrapped with a spiral of metal because that helped read the contraction of the muscle as it moved. It’s almost subconscious in the end,” said Andrew Whitehurst, VFX Supervisor, Double Negative.
Conscious or subconscious, the creation of Ava is a spectacular triumph for technology, and the UK in particular. Double Negative is based in London’s Fitzrovia and now employs more than 1,000 people, it special effects having been used on some of the world’s biggest-grossing movies over the past 15 years.
With such technology and the supernatural acting skills of Gleeson and Vikander as Caleb and Ava respectively, Ex_Machina is already one of the films of the year and the Oscars may yet come calling again for Double Negative.
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