Warfare

Route Spartan

or

"Look for the Blood and the Smoke! That's Where We Are!"

Warfare just drops you into it. The film, written and directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Civil War) and Ray Mendoza (who lived it) tells the story of an insignificant little troop deployment of Navy SEALS in Ramadi, Iraq in 2006 to lend support to a Marine operation nearby (in fact only 300 meters away!). Standard stuff. In and out. No mess no fuss.

 

They come in under cover of darkness, enter a strategically placed household, subdue the inhabitants, isolate them, put them out of operations' way, then monitor for any suspicious activity among the locals, any amassing, any weapons sightings, any what we call in the U.S. "assembly." Just basically "watch the backs" of the Marines. The radio contact is "5 by," they are well-armed and well-ammo'd, and they have a bird's eye view of the area from aerial surveillance that can track any warm body that comes into view. And they're frequently being updated on the mission status. Everything is nominal. From that point on, the movie runs in "real time."

Alpha One pumping up before the mission.

On top of that, they've punched a hole in the outer wall of an upstairs bedroom for Elliott Miller (Cosmo Jarvis), their lead sniper, to lay prone on a mattress for hours on end, peering through the telescopic sight of his M110 SASS rifle to take out anyone or anything that seems suspicious or out of place at a market across the street. It's maximum concentration for minimum movement, but you can't be too careful. Anything suspicious could be prelude to an attack on them, and if you have to pull a trigger to prevent yourself or your troop from dying, that's the job.

Of course, when the clock is ticking and you're just waiting for the sortie to be over, everything looks a little suspicious. But no shots are fired.  Sure, they're being watched...by people who duck so they're not being watched...and the aerial view shows there might be some amassing on the roofs, but things are merely heightened anticipation and they can be Bradley'd out of there within minutes. It's going to be fine.

Until a grenade is dropped through that sniper's nest hole into the bedroom where Miller and another SEAL are positioned. They're able to move quickly and out of the blast-radius, but the resulting explosion instantly turns the monitoring mission into an evac mission. Miller's left hand is bleeding, but treatable if they can get him back to the base quickly and so Bradley tanks are called while the crew sweats the minutes it will take to get them out of there. They are under attack, after all. And the sooner they can get Miller out the better. But, even with the best equipment American tax-dollars can buy, they are still trapped in a house (along with the civilians) and targets. They're surrounded. 

 

And things will only get worse.

The legal disclaimer ("This is a work of fiction", etc. etc) at the end of the movie is unlike any I've seen. I didn't have time to write it down and I haven't found anything that quotes it on the internet, but basically it says it's based on a true incident that was parsed from several interviews (and Mendoza was part of the SEAL team) and any inaccuracies are entirely due "to memory." And, indeed, Miller—who's a real guy—has no recollection of the incident, even though he lost a limb, received severe burns and lost the ability to speak. In part, Mendoza wanted to make the film for him and dedicated it to him.

And from what I've been reading online, a lot of Iraq vets are saying that it's brutally accurate. If true, it is harrowing what we put our fighting men through, even if the the mission depicted was only in a support capacity. There is no safe place in a war-zone (for anybody) and no action taken does not attract a reaction. And with the sophistication of the weaponry, the destruction is catastrophic. It makes you wonder why anybody does it? Why do governments launch wars knowing that the end-result is winning rubble and destroyed infrastructure? What is "gained" by that? But, over the last couple years, that's all we've seen on a day-to-day basis, escalating destruction and death over cratered territory. For what?

I've also read some online critiques that the film is "pointless." Hardly. Not if the portrait it paints is as accurate as has been said and the filmmakers have accomplished their goal, ignoring the jingoism, the cliches, the false melodrama and cheap theatrics in the name of creating drama. It's dramatic enough without inserting fudged ironies into it. The conflict is real without back-story and motivation. The real motivation is living through it, plain and simple. You can say that "war is hell", but Warfare makes it look like insanity. And as director Sam Fuller used to say the only glory in war is surviving it. Giving it to us straight, while we're sitting in our comfortable theater seats, is hardly pointless...especially if it makes us think twice.

The most telling part of Warfare is when the echoes die and the dust settles and the SEAL team gone, and the family of the occupied house come out of hiding and see the slippery blood-trails and multitudes of cartridges on the floor, the holes in the wall, and devastation left behind. Then, there's a shot of the street that moments before was a killing field as villagers come out of their doorways, some armed, some not, walking past body-parts through the smoke that has been left behind. Mendoza has enough wherewithal to include them in the aftermath of the destruction, and one can't help but think that somewhere they're thinking the same thought as you.

 

One hopes there won't be a sequel.

But hopes...and prayers...are ultimately...useless. And...finally...comes the realization that that is the one word that accurately describes the unholy act of war.

Civil War (2024)

America "in the Twilight Zone"

or

"You Never Know What's Coming Around the Next Corner."

There was part of me that wanted to write a long preamble prior to watching Alex Garland's Civil War and lead with that. I'm glad I resisted that idea. Because if there's one thing I've learned about Alex Garland is that he never makes the movie you expect he's going to make. That was true of Ex Machina and Annihlation and Men. None of those—two of them sci-fi and one out-and-out horror film—defied expectations and were something completely different from either your expectations or experiences. You may come out confused, or disoriented, but you would hardly be bored.

You might even walk out pissed off.

But, not bored.

But, Civil War is not science fiction, it's speculative fiction (and oblique speculative fiction, at that)...there's no fancy technology—this war is conducted with Humvee's, automatic weapons, and helicopters (there's not even a drone in sight!). It's speculative...but not the way you might think it is...like, with some recognizable political perspective that reflects the fractured state we appear to be in now. There's plenty of things for people to cherry-pick (we'll look at those), but just as many things to confound that perspective (we'll look at those, too).

The President (Nick Offerman) is preparing a speech to the Nation about America's latest victories in the war with the "Western Front"—a group of secessionist states at war with the government. "It is," in his words, "the greatest victory in the history of military campaigns."

That's hardly "The War to End All Wars" language. But, it is enough to raise literal questions among a quartet of journalists embarking to set off to Washington D.C. to try to interview the President, despite POTUS labeling the press as "enemy combatants." The group is Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a veteran reporter who writes "for what's left of The New York Times" and who labels the President's latest announcement as "nothing, he could have chosen words at random; Joel (Wagner Moura), a war correspondent from Reuters, who seems to have a "jones" for being in the thick of the action; Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a award-winning photojournalist, also from Reuters; and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young up-and-coming photojournalist wannabe, whom Lee saved from getting concussed by a bombing of an Environmental Protection truck at a New York City protest. Sammy walks with a cane and Lee thinks he's too old and too fat to be useful where they're going, and she's pissed at Joel for letting Jessie talk him into letting her go on their journey. She thinks all the "baby-sitting" will get in the way of getting the story.

Their passengers should be the least of her worries. The 857 mile trip to D.C. will be littered with evidence of a country in crisis. Major highways are clogged with abandoned cars, shopping malls appear to be ground-zeros for attacks with crashed choppers in the paring lot and the ubiquitous short-stay high-rise hotels are chunked by missile damage. Tracers dot the skies at night amid the muffled reports of automatic weapons fire. Snipers occupy roof-tops, and an abandoned stadium is a handy, if crowded refugee camp for Americans bombed out of their living quarters. Spielberg tried to depict the concept of "American refugees" in his version of War of the Worlds, but Garland's version has all the verisimilitude of the nightly news, only a bit tidier.

So, what happened to us? Nothing is spelled out—we aren't given a long opening crawl to read at the beginning—we're just plopped down in the middle of the chaos (not unlike Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool) to learn what we can. Some of it sounds plausible: possible questions the group might ask when they reach their destination are tossed around like "Mr. President, do you have any regrets during your third term?" (third term?) "How about your dismantling of the FBI?" "Do you regret ordering air-strikes on American citizens?" When they stop to get gas, the surly militia guys guarding the pumps won't fill the tank for $300...but they will for $300, "Canadian."

But, there are disconnects that take you out of direct parallels: Lee is most famous for "the legendary picture of 'the Antifa massacre'." The "Western Forces" moving into Washington D.C. are a combined unit of the states of California and Texas (with reinforcements from the "Florida Alliance"). Both of those concepts jolt you out of thinking Civil War has anything to do with reality, but its concept of a trigger-happy America with grudges around every corner skews a bit closer to the home we know. As is the section where they drive through a seemingly normal rural town—reminded that there's a civil war going on, a shop-clerk says "we try to stay out of it" while the roof-tops are scouted by snipers.

The civil war isn't really the focus of the movie, either, but the back-drop in which reporters have to thread their way through "unprecedented times" to "get the story." And record truth in the same way they record conflicts in foreign countries. The good and the bad, but mostly bad. And they do it unblinking because someone has to look. And tell the tale. So others can decide. Although Lee admits that when she was covering foreign hot-spots, she was hoping to send home the message "Don't Do This."

 

For all the good it did. Most people ignore it or "stay out of it." Lucky them.

"Where's Joel?"

"Processing..."

For however preposterous the particulars, the general idea is that it can happen here...and might. And then the Constitution starts shredding, as people start to force their own interpretation on others. There is one cracker-jack of a scene—at some point it'll show up as a Sunday "Don't Make a Scene"—that features an un-billed Jesse Plemons as a militiaman in charge of a dubious operation that the quartet stumble upon that quickly escalates to a hostage situation, the "Are you American? What kind of American are you?" scene that is only hinted at in the trailers. He's crossed over where he doesn't need to know particulars ("Reuters? What's that?") nor does he care to learn. He makes decisions cavalierly and unhesitatingly and doesn't care if he makes a mistake—he'll just bury it. Plemons is so good at playing casually dangerous that the scene crackles with the authenticity of a body-cam and with escalating horror. Yeah, it could happen. It could definitely happen.

If there's a fault to be had, it's of the "Chekhov's Gun" variety—things talked about in the opening become significant in the second and third act as the stakes build. But, one can concede the point that this is veterans talking about the dangers and imparting wisdom to uninitiated. They impart that wisdom in the hope that it doesn't happen. But, it's happened before, so they talk about it, knowing full well that what's happened before...

The movie ends when the particular goals are met and things achieved. But like most Garland movies, it leaves you asking "What Happens Next", although the most typical scenario is discussed—as if by order of Chekhov. But, that is not Civil War's concern. It rack-focuses your mind back to the journalists and what has just transpired because at some point the movie has to end, and one is left contemplating the "Who" and the "What" and the "When" and the "How."

But, never the "Why."

Men

I was going to publish this earlier in the week, but even as I parsed out the film while writing this, I decided that it would best be left for Saturday, which is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day.

 

They're All Alike

or

Literally, I Don't Know What's Going On
 

Harper Marlowe (Jessie Buckley) wants to "get away from it all." She's just suffered a traumatic incident in her life: an argument with her husband James (Paapa Essiedu) over a divorce has resulted in his death—but whether it was a deliberate suicide or an accident is a matter of conjecture. Harper, however, feels responsible, even if the argument was a case of deflection, mutual accusations and a fight ended in her being hit. She had no control over James' actions and was locked in her apartment when she suddenly sees husband him fall past her window to be smashed on the pavement below. 

 

Some time has now passed and we watch Jessie drive away from London in her Ford Fiesta as the roads get narrower and the surroundings get more rustic. She is in the country, moving away from us to the background of Lesley Duncan's "Love Song" promising calmer surroundings and bucolic settings in which to recover, heal, and contemplate. She's alone now, and it appears that there will be plenty of time for her to get herself together.

Her destination is a country house four hours out of town, and its a lovely old structure, 500 years old—"Shakespeare. Or pre-" explains the owner, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear)—but with all the modern conveniences like inside plumbing, gas range, motion-sensor lights outside, and a lovely orchard dominated by a large apple tree, which (of course) compels her to pluck a fruit and take a large bite—Oh, that never works out good in stories. Geoffrey even makes a joke out of it "No-no-no-no-no-no-no. Mustn't do that. Forbidden fruit" then, he smiles a wide toothy grin and says it's just a joke, eat all she wants "make a chutney if you want." He gives her a tour of the place and it's a combination of ancient and modern, the walls painted an earthy red. That'll come in handy later. Blood-splatter and all.

She's all by herself—although Geoffrey reassures her he lives right down the lane—alone with her thoughts. She's still going over the argument in her mind, and the image of James falling past her window. She's haunted by it, the image of him on the ground, ankle shattered and twisted at an odd angle, his arm impaled at the wrist by a wrought-iron fence. She can't shake it, so she takes Geoffrey up on a suggestion to go on a nature walk. The pathways are rough and she gets a little lost until she comes across an overpass that produces a long tunnel with some interesting echoing aspects. But, at the other end she sees a figure who watches her and then runs towards her. She turns and runs back the way she came, but she gets lost and when another blocked overpass stops her cold, she roughs it up an embankment and continues her way back to the B and B.

She passes by a ramshackle house in terrible disrepair and decides to take a picture. But, when she views the snap...standing in front of it is a naked man (Rory Kinnear). She looks up from the camera and there he is, scratched up, scarred and watching her. She runs back to the B and B and calls a friend (Gayle Rankin), but while she's talking to her she doesn't notice that the man is now in the orchard and staring in the windows at her. When she finally notices, she calls the police and the man is arrested by a couple officers (Rory Kinnear and Sarah Twomey) and he's taken away—a vagrant, apparently, and considered "harmless."

But, he's not, is he? After her estranged husband's death, and then this creep, Harper no longer feels safe, not even in the house. But, the guy's in jail, right? So she goes on another walk around and comes across an ancient church. No one there. So, she sits and contemplates and the grief comes pouring out of her. The church vicar (Rory Kinnear) observes from afar, but does not approach. Outside, she encounters a tween (Rory Kinnear) wearing a Marilyn Monroe mask and starts hectoring her. The vicar interrupts, words are exchanged, and the kid stomps away, leaving Harper and the vicar to discuss her break-down in the church. But, the conversation leans into the accusatory even as the vicar leans in to touch her leg.

Ew.

Alex Garland's third film, Men, is a creepy, methodical horror film that finds dread in even the most innocent-seeming circumstances. One starts looking around corners of the screen for the out-of-place and off-putting, every note, every beat, every sound designed to put you on your guard. All that detail and all that deliberateness stands in the service of putting us in Harper's head-space of grief and isolation, where inner thoughts and outer appearances are mutual threats to the being. Then, when these men (Rory Kinnear) start showing up, all of them are passive-aggressive or just plain aggressive, not passing up an opportunity to imply, or judge, or man-splain, or dismiss...or accuse...or invade. It's clear that Garland is saying something about the lot of women, and the guarded world-view of threat that is endured on a day-to-day basis.

All well and good. Up to a point. As good a job as Kinnear does playing multiple roles in distinctly creepy ways, the fact that all the men are him creates a sense of false narrative to the point where we start questioning not them...but her and her state of mind. These guys can't be all the same person—there's a bar scene where everybody is played by Rory Kinnear (Rory Kinnear)—so, is there something wrong with her, with her perceptions? If the point was to show her threatened in a toxic man-verse, adding the doppelganger casting undermines it...and her.

The problem is compounded in the film's closing moments when the film escalates into gory/grotesque assault mode with stuff that surpasses the creepiness factor of John Carpenter's version of The Thing. What are we to make of these manifestations popping out of each other's orifices? Is it real? (Probably not). Is it some sort of alien manifestation...ala The Thing? (No evidence of this has been implied). Is it a manifestation of her guilt and just her imagination (Which throws her character under the bus and doesn't explain all the blood that shows up in the house).

This is the danger with "metaphorical horror." In trying to make a point, you lose the thread of the story. Is it real or is it imagination? Is she to be believed or is she a false narrator? I tend to be sympathetic with the view that a world of men—all with their instincts and neuroses and phobias and fetishes—can be a challenging, even a frightening challenge for women (I've heard and sympathized and emotionally grumbled over too many stories of men in cars keeping silent pace with a lone female walking a street and witnessed the predatory nature of men in all sorts of situations not to be). Perhaps it's a matter of a studio wanting a "wowser" of a third act to sell a movie—I've heard a lot of that, too—but A24 is an art-house studio with a track record of leaving projects alone. No, I think it's a matter of an unreliable writer/director trying to make a point visually that has already been made...and betraying the lead character that sympathy has been built around. 

I mean, even if all the gory manifestations were true, would anyone believe her? Or will they blame her, obsessing, say, on what she was wearing? Or whether the timeline of her story held up. Or, whether, by their reckoning, such a thing could be possible, and so, her story must be false. What about her body language, for God's sake? I've seen too many trials and confirmation hearings to believe otherwise.

And that's a true, more pervasive horror. Nothing metaphorical about it.

Annihlation (2018)

Morph and Mindy
or
Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes (Turn and Face the Strange) 

There are flashbacks within flashbacks in Alex Garland's adaptation of "Annihilation" (the first book of Jeff VanderMeer's "Southern Reach" trilogy), part of a school of speculative fiction dubbed "The New Weird" and is one of those novels considered "unfilmable"—mostly because the book is written as a first-person journal of an expedition and is short on details (names, for instance) to the point where VanderMeer didn't get around to fleshing out the characters, which garnered criticism for the casting due to its lack of specific ethnicity, the clues to which didn't occur until the second book was published.

It's also an experiment in making its readers do the hard work of imagining, the literary equivalent to radio's conceit of a "Theater of the Mind,"* where suggestion sparks completion in that venue, creating a wily co-conspiracy of writer and reader. This has its dangers because "fans" (especially these days) take a personal stake in these things and become vocal (or take to what is ironically called "social" media) if their "vision" is not represented—not that anybody knew what that vision might be. This puts Garland in a touchy situation as it his job to make concrete what has previously been merely "airy-fairy" to the point of being deliberately vague. Every director has to do this to a certain extent, and producers put up the money for the "vision" that will make a return on their investment.** The business dictates that the only "vision" that matters be tinted green.

Best, then, to start with the basics; the first scene is a "just the facts" de-briefing between the protagonist (Natalie Portman), here named Lena, and three guys in hazmat suits who have a lot of questions. "What did you eat?" "What?" "You had rations for two weeks. You were there for four months." "I don't remember eating..." "How long do you think you were in there?" "Days. Maybe weeks." "What happened to Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson)?" "I dunno..." "What happened to the others?" "I dunno..." "What DO you know?" 

Not much, evidently. But, we do know that she's the sole survivor. Call her Ishmael.

With the mystery properly whetted, we cut to a comet heading for the Earth from the comet's perspective. VenderMeer never gives a cause for what becomes known as "the Southern Reach," but here it's a comet that strikes an area of beach with a lighthouse on it, it's impact causing no damage...not yet, anyway.

Cut to a cell dividing. In a classroom, Portman's character is talking about the process, but not in clinical terms of interphase stages or chromatin condensation. She's talking philosophically, not telling her class anything they don't already know, making the point that it's a single organism in the Universe, poor thing. Lena has a lot on her mind and she rebuffs an attempt by a comrade (David Gyasi) to attend a get-together. We learn that her husband has been missing for a year with no explanation of why, where, how...nothing.

But, that night he (Oscar Isaac) shows up unannounced...and without a word of explanation. She badgers him with questions, but he can only look at her hollow-eyed and be vague about where he's been and what happened to him—he doesn't know. All he knows is he was outside their house and it looked familiar. He takes a drink of water, and begins spasming, coughing up blood. An ambulance is called, but before they can get to the hospital, they are overtaken by a clutch of anonymous vehicles and forced off the road. Lena is knocked out.

She awakes in a spare hospital room and greeted by Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh) with "You must be feeling dreadful." Yeah, but Ventress is evasive about anything that her husband is stabilized but his organs are shutting down and they don't know why. But, over the next few days, Ventress will open up: her husband, Kane, was part of a mission to investigate "Area X"—they're in a facility outside "X" right now—and he is the only person to have emerged from the evacuated area. Something has happened in "Area X," what, they don't know—Ventress murmurs something about "a religious event, an extraterrestrial event..." what, she doesn't know, exactly—but "Area X" has been around for a few years...and it's growing, having already taken over an earlier compound in the swampy area. She's sent a team in, contact was lost, but only Kane emerged, and Ventress wants to know what's inside what she calls "The Shimmer" and what happened to the other men—were they killed or did they kill each other?

She assembles a team of soldier-scientists: herself—she's a psychologist, Anya Thorenson (Gina Rodriguez) a paramedic, Cass Sheppard (Tuva Novotny) an anthropologist, and Josie Radek (Tessa Thompson) a physicist. She needs a biologist and as Lena has a job teaching that at Johns Hopkins, Ventress asks that she join the team. Lena accepts—she wants to know what happened to Kane—but she keeps that information from the other team-members. Ventress, agreeing with the decision, maintains her silence about it.

The five enter "The Shimmer" and it is disorienting. Compasses don't work, radio's get scrambled, the flora and fauna are weirdly exotic and not entirely knowable, plus they have a tendency to lose track of time. Nerves are high, but they're able to focus on the routine. At a dilapidated boat-house, Lena is able to take some samples of the exotic vegetation vining around the house, but as she starts to take a closer examination, Josie is pulled into the house and she starts screaming.

Lena and the others run into the house which has been partially submerged in the swamp and are able to get Josie out fast, but, guns drawn, they see a huge albino alligator emerge from the house sink into the swamp and then turn and attack the party. Lena distracts it by firing at it, but the thing lurches towards her and she determinedly fires round after round point blank into the creature before it finally dies. An examination of the creatures mouth shows that it's teeth are more like shark's teeth. The party starts to be a bit freaked out. The Shimmer has somehow mutated the plants and animals inside it, scrambling GPS and radio waves, but also the very DNA of the flora and fauna. If that's so, then what is it doing to them?

To talk about it any further will be to rob any brave, potential viewers of one of the very palpable things that makes Annihilation work—its ability to evoke unease. I could mention a couple things and get away with it, but the element of surprise—and the dread of surprise—in such an environment really sets the nerves on edge. The unseen and unknowable is more tension-inducing than the seen and given the icky eerie imaginings in that place which have the "what else could happen" creepiness of the original Alien set in a landscape that is just as enveloping and throbbingly tense as those of Deliverance, Southern Comfort, and Apocalypse Now and you have an exercise in dread that takes you right down to the cellular level.

"And then, people start dying." Maybe, they're the lucky ones. It becomes clear that "The Shimmer" is messing with their DNA, and as nerves and minds becomes strained and the survival odds get lower, the team decide to "bug out"—if they can make it, but their judgment of time and distance doesn't make the job any easier. For Lena, the key to it all is the lighthouse at the center of it, and she's determined to get there. If not to find answers, hopefully, to find a solution...maybe, a cure.

And that's where things get really interesting. Not explicable, perhaps, but very interesting. In fact, more questions are raised than are probably answered, but there is an all-purveying sense that things have changed...irrevocably and there's no "reset" button to go back to pre-"Shimmer" days. You hope for the best in the outcome, but you're never really sure what "best" might be. Once Annihilation "hits the beach" everything is done by suggestion and imagery just specific enough to keep the momentum going, but there's no narration or voice-over to explain what is going on and that may unnerve the already nervous. But, it gives you a definite sense of the "unknowable" while telling its story purely by what you see.

It's challenging, both for the viewer, but also for the writer-director. Garland's job in this is to make what was suggested in the concept concrete. He has done that, while preserving a sense of "the definite ambiguity" in the film. I remember my first experience of watching 2001: a Space Odyssey and not having a clue what was going on and running to Arthur C. Clarke's book to get the answers. Clarke provided them. VanderMeer, not so much. I think that readers of the book may be just as confounded as those without the CliffNotes (which could make some backlash—along the lines of the way fans of Stephen King's "The Shining" were put off by the changes made in Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation. 

It makes me wonder how audiences will react to something this challenging (but worth it). I tend to see movie audiences being really dumbed-down these days from having been force-fed solutions and explanations, while, at the same time, being capable of handling ambiguity and "woo-woo" concepts that might stagger the imagination. Annihilation says a lot of things about embracing change and adaptation, while also being a thinly-veiled comment on accepting the immutable, like, say, global disaster. While not a complete invitation to blind acceptance, Annihilation will appeal to folks who like their science fiction scrambled rather than over-easy.

* My favorite story of "Theater of the Mind" is when Rod Serling (speaking of speculative fiction) was asked whether he preferred writing for television or radio and he mentioned that if he wrote "there was a castle on the hill" for television it would go to the budget department, then to the production department, to the art department, to the drafters, to the carpenters and set-dressers and painters and finishers and scenic decoration and at the end of it he'd get one castle on one hill. "But if I write 'there was a castle on the hill' in a radio script, it costs nothing and I get a thousand castles on a thousand hills."

** Garland had final cut and a producer (Scott Rudin) powerful enough to guarantee it, which he did when Skydance Productions demanded that Natalie Portman's character be made more "sympathetic" and the final parts of the film made more...oh, what's the word?..."obvious" (Reports say that it was considered "too complicated" and "too intellectual") after an earlier test-screening did not produce the approval numbers that were hoped. Rudin scotched that idea, forcing Paramount to set up a distribution deal with Netflix in the international markets. Paramount kept the domestic market distribution.

Ex Machina

She's My Little Deus Coupe
or
"Pardon Me, Ma'am, But You Have Too Much RAM
For a Real Live Girl..."

"Deus Ex Machina" is from the Greek for "God From the Machine" and is a literary term for that point when a dramatist has boxed himself into an unsolvable issue and solves it by a sudden and inexplicable occurrence. Something, or God, intervenes to distract or unite to come to terms. Ever read "The Stand" by Stephen King? There, God literally does intervene in the polarized battle between the good and the evil among the survivors of a world plague. The black monolith of 2001 is a literal "deus ex machina" and could be said to be the movie's protagonist. Even a western like Red River has a "deus ex machina" when Tess Millay, the woman common to both Tom Dunson and Matt Garth, suddenly shoots at them to stop their inevitable father-son death-struggle over dominance.

In Ex Machina, the new movie written and directed by Alex Garland (he wrote, The Beach, 28 Days Later, and Sunshine for Danny Boyle, as well as the adapted screenplays for Never Let Me Go and Dredd), there is no "Deus" as such. Just the pretend-kind, usually associated with those grabbing for power—the "little tin" kind. Appropriate.

It's a lucky day for Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson). A programming functionary at the BlueBook Corporation, which is the leading search engine on the Internet, he has won first prize in the BlueBook staff lottery; the prize is a week-long stay with the company's founder Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac) at his retreat who-knows-where. He is air-lifted there (he asks the chopper pilot when they're going to get to Bateman's property and gets the reply that they've been flying over it for the past two hours), and is instructed to follow the river to a relatively small structure that creates a card-key for him and lets him in. Now, this is a "smart" house.

But, looks are deceiving. The vast majority of Bateman's house is underground, with scattered areas of natural growth to maintain an edge of Nature. Caleb eventually finds "Nathan" working out after a bender decompressing from a long session of brain-storming, and it's here that Nathan tells Caleb why he's visiting (after making him sign "the mother of all NDA's"): to conduct a "Turing test" on his latest innovation, a functioning artificial intelligence. It's Caleb's "job" during the week to see just how non-machine-like Nathan's machine is, interviewing it in private (but closely monitored) sessions to see just how "human" this artificial intelligence is.

When he finally "meets" the A.I., named Ava (Alicia Vikander), it is a bit of a shock. Ava is a robot, walking around, speaking, fully functioning. Tough enough that this robot looks human (which would surely prejudice any objective conclusion to the ultimate question), but she is also wholly sympathetic. She/it is trapped in a glass enclosure, asking as many questions as she answers. Before Caleb, the only interaction it had was with Nathan, it's creator/programmer, and frankly, Nathan can be a bit tiring, after awhile, being completely narcissistic, and borderline self-destructive. But "tiring" is not really something concerning a machine. It never tires. It is always "on."  nd, given, it's 24/7 existence, it has a lot of time to think...and calculate.

A couple of things weigh on Caleb. There is his oddly inappropriate sympathy for Ava—she's (it's) trapped in her glass work-space (but what should that matter to a machine, especially a machine with no context of place other than it's station. The other thing, probably related, is that Ava is "female," at least in appearance. Why? Is that part of the test, to see how that affects Caleb's examination (in which case, who is being tested—Ava or Caleb?). Then, there's Ava's need to dress up in a wig and "girl-clothes" to appear human. She aspires. Should a machine aspire to anything? Or is she merely Pinocchio in drag, wanting to be real. But to what end? The back-and-forth between Caleb and Ava becomes personal and invasive. Then, things get very creepy.

During the Caleb/Ava interviews, there is an inevitable power-failure, the main generators of Nathan's house—actually "research facility"—shut down, the back-up batteries kick in and emergency lighting bathes the whole place in a creepy red glow. With the generators shut off, Nathan can no longer monitor the sessions and Ava throws a spanner into Caleb's works; she warns Caleb not to trust Nathan, that he's deceitful, planting a seed of conspiracy in Caleb, and setting the programmer on a quest to find out exactly what Nathan might be doing—and what his plans are for the A.I. program, and Ava in particular. One worrying aspect in this (among many) is that it is Ava who can kill the generators, something Nathan doesn't suspect and explains away by blaming the place's contractors. "I'm workin' on it," he deflects.

Nathan is focused on the project, but he's also a bit of a binger—getting drunk and being a prick to Caleb, questioning his competency and intentions. Caleb wants to know what will happen to Ava if she doesn't pass the test. The answer is simple: she'll be replaced, updated, re-programmed to fix the problems, her memory wiped and a new program, a better program installed. The answer is simple, but troubling; yes, you'd do that with any sub-standard operating system, but (as another movie put it) nobody's sure of what Ava might think about it. 

Ex Machina is very, very simple, but brilliant. It toys with the quest for intelligence—not memory, or mere problem-solving, but in wholly creative and imaginative reasoning...and what the responsibility is to that (for want of a better term) sentience. It calls upon references from The Bible, Greek myth, and, because of that, the "Frankenstein" story in its perambulations on the subject of intelligence and responsibility for it. We're pretty lousy on the record of human rights...are we going to be any better with thinking machines? What will be their function—slaves? Will we have to pay them $15 an hour, or merely the promise of a virus-free environment (does insurance cover that?). Do we tell them about Re-PC? 

The point may be moot—or may not compute. The machines may have the ultimate answer (and where are Asimov's laws of robotics when we need them?). In the meantime, even in Ex Machina's time, the humans aren't faring too well. Caleb gets so bent out of shape by the mind/mainframe games that he even begins to doubt himself, wondering if he might be a robot (good thing Ridley Scott didn't direct this) and injected into the scenario to see if maybe he's the one being tested, a case of the worm Turing. What is Nathan's motivation? For all that, what is Ava's? Can she/it even have motivations?

Ex Machina poses a lot of questions, doesn't provide easy answers and is an exquisite little cautionary tale about man, machine, and perception. How much do we want machines to be "like" us...and to what end? If anything, the idea is to evolve—do we want machines based on our thought processes, patterns and conclusion-jumping when we're doing enough damage ourselves, or do we want to improve on our failings and make something better? In the reverse, why would a machine aspire to be human (it can observe, right?) At one point, Nathan says "Someday the A.I.'s are going to look at us like would looking at fossils in the desert." Quite likely.

But it's doubtful they could make a movie as good as this one is.