As Technology Continues to Advance, Can a Human and Robot Ever Connect?

Alicia Vikander as Ava in "Ex Machina" 

One of the powers of science-fiction movies is that they can visualize how far technology can go.  These movies predict how we would use it and whether those uses will help us or hurt us.

In director Alex Garland’s sci-fi psychological drama, “Ex Machina,” he focuses on the topic of artificial intelligence and how disturbingly close we might be to having it become part of our reality.

Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is a young computer programmer who wins a weeklong trip to the mountain home/research facility of his reclusive boss, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac).  Nathan reveals to Caleb that he was brought to this home to be a part of an experiment to see if he and Nathan’s humanoid AI, Ava (Alicia Vikander), can form an emotional and romantic connection.  While their interactions start off innocently enough, Caleb soon learns that there is more to this experiment than Nathan is letting on.

As the protagonist, Domhnall Gleeson instantly strikes you as a loner, which perfectly fits with the middle-of-nowhere location where he spends the whole movie.  Gleeson’s character is someone who seems to have a bigger connection to technology than to actual people, and he calls to mind Joaquin Phoenix’s character from the 2013 film “Her.”  With Gleeson’s portrayal of Caleb, there are some questions that arise that we have to ask ourselves: Are we supposed to feel sorry for him that he can connect to a robot better than to a person?  Or, should we be happy for him that he has found someone that has both human-like and technological qualities that make Ava his ideal mate?  These are inquiries that will surely have you change your opinion of his character a few times.

Oscar Isaac provides his role with a mad-scientist quality, but not in the sense of having the disposition of a lunatic.  Instead, there’s an eerie calm about him that cloaks the unsettling and obsessive genius behind him.  Right from the beginning of the film, you know there’s something off-kilter in his character, and the more we learn about him, the more we begin to question if his contributions to science are helpful or harmful.  

Alicia Vikander projects a striking vulnerability and soft-spoken personality as Ava.  Being kept behind glass walls, she is like a high-tech zoo animal on display to be studied and tested on, but has human desires glowing in her eyes.  Vikander expertly has her vocal intonations and mannerisms teeter on the line between humanlike and robotic, all of which culminates in a haunting performance, especially because of how believably genuine Vikander brings out the “human” side to her character.

With Garland’s screenplay, you eventually start to think that its ending is going to be fairly obvious, but the story changes your expectations entirely for the final 15 minutes.  After your first viewing, you might even want to experience it again to see how the film wasn’t as deceptively simple as you might have thought earlier on when watching it.

Similar to Garland’s screenplay for the 2010 film “Never Let Me Go,” he works with a narrative that places a seemingly impossible romance within the backdrop of a questionable scientific breakthrough.  He encourages you to debate the possibility of such a relationship that is depicted in the film and how a humanoid with artificial intelligence would assimilate into today’s society.  Given how technologically advanced we are, would it even bother us?  Or, would we be troubled by it?   

Garland sets the film almost entirely within the walls of Nathan’s research facility, so this helps the viewer in feeling the sensation that Caleb has when being ensnared by this building.  We become highly familiar with his surroundings and constantly feel the entrapment and uncertainty that Caleb experiences throughout his stay with Nathan.  

For the film’s location, Garland constructs a clever juxtaposition between the technological world of Nathan’s lab with that of the outside world.  Beyond the lab, you have the surrounding natural environment where there isn’t any sign of technology, recalling a world before machines, but then you have the imprisoned Ava, a symbol of how far the world’s technology can advance.

Garland is known best for his screenplays in the sci-fi and horror genres, and in his directorial debut, he displays an ability to blend elements of these two genres and shows that he’s capable of handling these elements as a director every bit as well as he can as a writer.  With a small cast and confined setting, Garland employs highly effective use of these components and extracts everything he can from them, making “Ex Machina” a cautionary tale that’s not to be missed.

Final grade: A 

As a Target of Vengeance, This Road Crew is Ready with its Engines Revving

From left: Tyrese Gibson, Michelle Rodriguez, Paul Walker, and Chris Bridges in "Furious 7"

You really have to hand it to the “Fast and the Furious” series for making it this far.  Who would have thought that the original film from 2001 would gain this much popularity and eventually reach a seventh installment?  I certainly didn’t.  When you think that these movies have already been coming out over a span of 14 years, it’s actually quite impressive.  

As the series goes on, you just have to embrace the fact that the car stunts are going to become more and more over-the-top, requesting that you accept these films for the fun ridiculousness that they are.

In director James Wan’s “Furious 7,” he continues the trend of the films one-upping each other in the high levels of enjoyable absurdity that this franchise can muster, thereby creating the most out-of-control and crazy installment to date.

Following the events of “Fast and Furious 6,” the villainous Owen Shaw (Luke Evans) is left in a coma after his confrontation with Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel), Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker), and their crew, prompting Owen’s assassin brother, Deckard (Jason Statham), to set out for revenge.  Before Dom and his group can take down Deckard, however, they are asked by a secret-ops leader (Kurt Russell) to obtain a computer-hacking program known as the God’s Eye and save its creator (Nathalie Emmanuel) from mercenary Mose Jakande (Djimon Hounsou).  If they accomplish this, Dom and his group will be allowed to use this coveted hacking tool to track down Deckard.  This will lead them on a globe-trotting mission that will prove to be more dangerous than anything they have dealt with before.

It goes without saying that you don’t go to these movies for the acting, and while the performances are passable, there isn’t much to them.  However, a positive you can say about the cast is that their chemistry is as strong as it was when this series first began.

Seeing as Jason Statham is one of today’s modern action-movie stars, I was hoping for there to be a little more to his antagonistic role.  I know this series doesn’t prioritize in writing layered characters, but I wish Statham had a little more included in his part.  Except for a couple of scenes where he has some dialogue, he usually just shows up on screen to continue his rampage against Dom and his crew, and then leaves until he’s ready to appear again.

The screenplay by Chris Morgan, who has written all of the films in this series since “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” mainly just has the crew going from location to location in order to set up the next big action sequence.  What you have to understand about the stories in this series is that the writers know that factors such as characters and decent narratives come second to the action scenes.  While that is something I’m normally against, this series has built its reputation on these sequences and acknowledges how unapologetically and gleefully preposterous it all is.

“Furious 7” marks the final film appearance by Paul Walker, after his passing in November 2013, and the movie does a moving tribute to him in the film’s final scene, one that really expresses the deep friendship between Walker and Diesel’s characters.  In a series that was never really required to have much emotion in its stories, this sequence adds a refreshingly good deal of it.

Although most of director Wan’s filmography has dealt heavily in the horror genre, he shows that he doesn’t have any problem handling an action film as big as this.  Wan fully delivers on the spectacle in the film’s three big set pieces, especially in the final showdown in Los Angeles, which actually manages to top the fun absurdity of the climactic runway scene in “Fast and Furious 6.”

At this point, it’s difficult to tell how many more entries in this franchise we’ll be getting.  The brotherly connection between Walker and Diesel is the center of these movies, and because “2 Fast 2 Furious” only had Walker and “Tokyo Drift” had neither of them (except for Diesel’s cameo at the end of the latter), those two installments ended up being my least favorites, so I’m not sure how an eighth film will fare without Walker.  Although it would be best to finish the series with “Furious 7,” the film’s ending sets up the franchise for another sequel, which is set for an April 2017 release.  At this point, I guess all we can do is wait and see where the series can go from here.

After this franchise brought the main group back together for the fourth installment, which was the first time that was done since the original, a lot of my excitement for these movies returned.  I’ve certainly been enjoying this series ever since, but I think it will very soon be time to put this franchise in park.

Final grade: B

Going Out on a Date, Returning with a Curse

Maika Monroe as Jay in "It Follows"

In terms of horror movies, we’re in a time where a well-made horror film can be difficult to come by, and most of the time, we have to resort to re-watching the classics if we want to get our share of horror that will stick in our brains and make us quiver.

In David Robert Mitchell’s “It Follows,” he brings a horror movie that does more than set out to scare us, but one that wants to have us talk about it with our friends long after it’s over.

One night, college student Jay (Maika Monroe) goes on a date with her new boyfriend, Hugh (Jake Weary).  After they drive to a deserted area of town and get intimate in his car, he knocks her out with chloroform.  When Jay wakes up tied to a chair, Hugh reveals that he passed on a curse to her, which will haunt her and kill her unless she finds someone to make love to and pass it to that person.  Jay soon recruits the help of her friends to find a way to defeat this mysterious curse.

Maika Monroe’s performance is one that effectively displays her character’s fear and courage concerning her dilemma.  She presents her character as a very innocent young woman in the film’s beginning, serenely relaxing in a pool and looking like she’s at ease with everything around her.  This makes us feel all the more sorry for her when she’s suddenly thrown into this strange and terrifying situation.  Similar to other female protagonists of classic horror movies, Monroe’s character is proactive in trying to defeat the evil that’s chasing her and becomes braver as she goes further into her task of fighting off the curse.

Michael Gioulakis’ cinematography makes great use of long takes, especially in the film’s very unsettling opening shot, where we follow a girl as she’s running from an unseen paranormal terror.  The use of long takes as they linger on their subjects gives the disquieting feeling of stalking the characters, similar to the curse itself.  In some instances, Gioulakis also employs 360-degree panning shots that give us the sensation that the terror can come from any direction.

The movie has a distinct ‘80s horror-movie feel, and the score by Disasterpeace certainly contributes to that.  The menacing and dreamlike score is certainly one of the most unsettling we’ll hear in any modern horror movie, and it adds considerably to the highly eerie atmosphere.

Although the screenplay by Mitchell has a premise that could strike people as a very B-movie plot, it’s handled with a great deal of cleverness as it takes the familiar horror-movie element of teen intimacy and adds an intelligent twist to it.  As we’re watching the film, it’s obvious what the curse is a symbol for, but we walk out of the movie with a couple of theories pertaining to the directions in which this symbol can go, and it’s bound to have viewers analyzing it, especially when it comes to the ending.

Mitchell applies some jump scares occasionally, but the film doesn’t lower itself to overusing them.  Instead, it relies on aspects such as camera movements, music, and mood, and he knows how to utilize these moviemaking tools to make us nervous with dread of what might happen next.  

With “It Follows,” he provides horror fans with a film that’s both enjoyably chilling and has the ability to open up a dialogue among viewers.  So, check out this film with your horror-fan friends and join in on the discussion.

Final grade: A-