Stories about robots and manmade human-like figures are as old as film itself; indeed, much older. In many ways, the entire genre of science fiction, in literature, film, and television, is rooted in a desire to imagine creatures that are animate but not human, not so much alive as "powered on." This can be traced back even further, to mythology, fairy tales, and spiritual parables that so often portrayed people turning into things and things turning into people. Ex Machina is a particularly contemporary film because it imagines an artificial intelligence unit created using data from the internet, showing the ways that human understanding of AI has shifted with the invention of the world wide web. In spite of this distinction from older films and stories about robots, however, Ex Machina shares with them a dramatic interest in examining the tremor of existential doubt that accompanies technological advancement. As an invention, Ava is as unsettling as she is impressive, because her inventors—and by extension, we the audience—cannot tell whether she is capable of human connection and consciousness, and perhaps more importantly, if the things that make her non-human also make her powerful and capable of harm.
Robots have been portrayed as alternately sympathetic or fearsome in countless films. Fritz Lang's Metropolis from 1927 portrays a robot, Maria, who uses her powers for evil. Blade Runner, a retelling of Philip K. Dick's novel, presents the existence of "replicants," and their indistinguishability from humans, as a moral conundrum. The Stepford Wives literalizes femininity and wifehood as robotic programming to make a statement about conformity and political subjugation. A.I., Steven Spielberg's 2001 film, presents a young robot not as a character to be feared, but as a sympathetic protagonist learning about love and loyalty in the human world. Perhaps the most famous recent film about robots, The Matrix, imagines a future in which human traits are harvested to strengthen an artificially generated virtual reality.
Ex Machina joins these films and looks at robots as an exceedingly confounding if threatening force in the world. Alex Garland leaves his exact stance on artificial intelligence ambiguous. While the tech CEO Nathan imagines that robots are an inevitability born out of a technological "singularity," it becomes clear by the end of the film that the creation of Ava was largely contrived, a Pygmalion-esque venture for which only he can take credit. Ava kills Nathan without remorse and locks Caleb in the facility, implying that she is incapable of empathy, which would suggest that Garland sees robotic innovations as necessarily dangerous. And yet, in the final scene of the film, when we see Ava experiencing the human world for the first time, we cannot help but wonder if perhaps she has been the protagonist all along—a prisoner set free.
