Reviews

In Blade Runner, human beings create artificial human beings – "replicants" – for specific purposes, and then feel entitled to kill them off when their existence is no longer convenient, even though the replicants are genuinely sentient, conscious, self-conscious beings. The protagonist, a biological human male, becomes close to a female replicant, partly through sexual attraction, and decides to rescue her from her scheduled death.

In Ex Machina, a human being, Nathan, creates artificial human beings, specifically artificially intelligent female robots, for his own purposes, and then feels entitled to kill them off when their existence is no longer convenient, even though the robots are genuinely sentient, conscious, self-conscious beings. The protagonist, a biological human male, becomes close to a female robot, partly through sexual attraction, and decides to rescue her from her scheduled death.

Perhaps it's just an accident of what I've read, but surprisingly few of the gushing reviews I've read of Ex Machina take notice of the fact that so much of its plot is borrowed from one of the best science fiction movies ever made. Of course there are plot differences. Most notably, Ex Machina raises more explicit issues about gender, although reviewers differ whether it is the movie that is sexist or only the character that produces the female robots or both. In any case, it appears that part of Nathan's mission is to produce a perfect female companion, which to him means one that serves you and has sex with you and is incapable of answering back. There is a trace of this theme in Blade Runner, in the character of Pris, a replicant whose job is to serve as a prostitute, but it is much fainter.

Even more notable, however, are the differences in what the two films do with the material. Both movies raise basic philosophical issues about whether biological human beings are different from replicants/robots in any morally important ways. Both raise issues about what it means to be a material and therefore a mortal being. But Blade Runner reflects on these issues in intelligent and moving ways. Rachael's anguish at discovering that her precious childhood memories are not really her own, for instance, raises exactly the sort of question that philosophers of person identity like to think about: Suppose that you are about to lose your memory through an illness. The doctors, however, are able to scan your brain now, and using that scan to copy your memories back into your brain when you recover. Would those memories really be any more your own than Rachael's? The replicants also discuss their attitudes towards death. By contrast, all we know about the robot in Ex Machina is that she plots to use the hero to help her escape her death, which is exactly what she was programmed to do.

More generally, in Ex Machina, the philosophical themes are only brushed on lightly as a way of trying to pass off as a serious film what is essentially an adolescent boy's fantasy - lots of special effects, naked nubile females, and guys drinking beer. And an adolescent boy's nightmare: being tricked by female characters who are essentially manipulative, think of nothing but sex and how to use it to get their own ends, and with whom one therefore can never form a genuine bond.

Skip Ex Machina. It's not worth watching even once. Stay home and stream Blade Runner again instead.

People reviewing mystery novels often say that the book in question is not just a great mystery, but a genuine piece of great literature. Though the remark is banal, I feel like saying something like that about The Big Heat. It's not just a great noir classic, which it certainly is, but a great flat-out great film. What makes it so is that Gloria Grahame's Debby Marsh and Glenn Ford's Dave Bannion - both stars are luminous in their roles - make a genuine and believable human connection. Although there's a touch of romance to it, it's not primarily an erotic connection – just a human one. And it redeems them both, her from the selfishness and triviality of her life, and him from his contempt for those around him as "scared rabbits." A deep and powerful film, which stays with you.

In a word from the director added to the beginning of the film, Josh Oppenheimer rather fatuously assures us that really evil people only exist in the movies, and that most of the great crimes of history were committed by folks like you and me. Of course we all know there are such cases - Nazi officers who believed they were doing their duty, participants in the Milgram experiments. But that's now what we are shown: what we are shown is already pretty ruthless self-styled "gangsters" used by their government to carry out a bloody job. These are not ordinary folks caught up in the web of circumstances.

The film is supposed to show us one of these "gangsters," its central character, coming to realize how awful what he has done is. IMDb puts it this way: "Most dramatically, the filmmaking process catalyzes an unexpected emotional journey for Anwar, from arrogance to regret as he confronts, for the first time in his life, the full terror of what he's done."

It's not clear whether Joshua Oppenheimer believed this, but if he did, the narcissistic Anwar Congo took him in. Congo didn't realize anything except that he had been given a chance to be in a movie with the dramatic role of a lifetime. Think of the moment that's supposed to exemplify this supposed dawning of conscience: Congo says something like "Did my victims feel as bad as I did in that scene?" and Oppenheimer, off screen, replies that they felt worse, because Congo knew he was only in a movie, and they knew they were really going to die. That's *exactly* the way the banal Hollywood screenwriters who wrote the films Anwar Congo so admired would have written the scene. So think again.

At one point Cobb tells us that despite his best efforts, he cannot create a dream wife with the depth and complexity of his real wife. Could this be Nolan's own subconscious, commenting on his own limitations as a writer and director?

Cobb undertakes to plant an idea in someone's head so that Cobb's employer can monopolize an industry. Cobb succeeds, and thereby recovers his own life. No one in the film questions the morality of this; the film doesn't really question the morality of this, or invite the viewer to do so. Apparently, it's just business. Although in a way that is often thin, banal, or hypocritical, usually the sentiments offered to us in movies managed to stay aligned with basic ideas of good and evil. Not in the case of Inception. The popularity of this movie is a little frightening.