Ex Machina: A Review

So I made a promise, to the internets, that I’d make a post every Thursday.

Yeah, so it’s Friday now…

All that not withstanding, today I saw “Ex Machina”, a film written and directed by Alex Garland.  To the uninitiated, it’s not worth seeing.

Now don’t get me wrong, the cinematography was beautiful, Oscar Isaac’s performance was superb, and I love films that feature artificial intelligence and artificial life as their primary topic.  Independent films also hold a special place in my heart, because they don’t (often) have to follow the same modes and methods of Hollywood to sell tickets; they’re a lot freer in artistic expression.  Despite all of these positives that would make me like this film, I don’t.

I think the biggest eyesore was Domhnall Gleeson’s acting.  Oscar Isaac was not only a stronger character in the narrative, Isaac’s performance was just more convincing than Gleeson.  The good news is that Gleeson was better than Hayden Christensen in Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith.  The bad news is that it wasn’t by much.

His lines seemed… forced, lackluster, and just unconvincing.  The only sense of character we got from him was not by how he said things, but by what he said, and did, which points to superior writing, not superior acting.

Speaking of overall acting skills, Alicia Vikander’s character didn’t have much to her—but that was kinda of the point.  She remains more or less benign, and somewhat innocent and vulnerable.  While she played her role very well, it is unfortunate that we were not able to see the depths of her talents.  She had to remain as a portion of the background, a sad but necessary sacrifice for her role.

When one puts “Ex Machina” into Google, the search engine will most likely return with “japanese actress” amended somewhere in the results (her name is Sonoya Mizuno by the way).  Again, she had to stay in the background, and remained more like a set piece than anything else.  I think we could’ve seen a little more development in her character, but my main criticism is not in her acting skills or her character’s role in the story: it’s why she was casted.

Mizuno’s physical features are more akin to European standards of beauty than Japanese;  giving her blonde hair would make it incredibly difficult to establish her nation of origin.  If that was an intentional move of the casting director’s part then I think it was an interesting one.  She did affect an exotic, secretive, and sexual air when she was present in a scene, but if that was her purpose, then why was she there, aside from the novelty?  A curious choice indeed.

I will say that the mounting tension in the beginning portion of the film was well-done.  Little things like the computerized door remaining unforthcoming set the tone of nondisclosed secrets throughout the film.  Telling Caleb’s character that they have been flying over the estate for the last two hours shows that the person he is visiting is immensely rich.  Our introduction to one of the characters while they are boxing foreshadows violence and aggression—that little threat always hanging over the main character’s head.  Little things like that shows that the script had great potential, but in the end it still needed more polish.

Oh, and the quote about “writing the history of gods” is just as cliché spoken as it is while reading it.

Acting: 6/10

Casting: 7/10

Cinematography/Set Design: 7/10

Dialogue: 5/10

Soundtrack: 6/10

Special Effects: 7/10

Parental Content Advisory: Prevalent female nudity (more in the anatomical than sexual sense), and some sensuality (these two factors not in the same scenes).

TL;DR: If you’re a fan of robot sci-fi and independent films, go see this movie.  If not, then don’t bother.

The Three Flavors of Robot Films

I love robots.  I also love golems and homunculi.  I like the concept of unliving things being assembled then acting as if they were alive.  If you think about it, you and I are pretty much the same thing; unliving mattered assembled and declared “alive”.  What then is the difference between a machine and human?  What is that dividing line between sentient and non-sentient?

Anthropologists and psychologists are still debating what aspects define sentience.  Is someone brain-dead still considered alive?  Do other higher order primates have sentience?  When does half-sentience quantify as full-sentience?  Is there such a thing as half-sentience?  Can some humans have more sentience than others?

Robot films can ask these questions, but they don’t always take advantage of the genre’s ability to ask them. Robot films are usually restricted to three flavors: immortal servants, doom of mankind, or just a tool.  The most popular of these flavors is doom of mankind (“Terminator”, “I, Robot”), followed by immortal servants (“AI: Artificial Intelligence”, “Wall-E”), and then just a tool (any anime featuring mecha).  Rarely do robot films really ask the above questions.  In “doom of mankind” scenario, people are too worried about killing the thing with bodies of steel and circuitry.  “Immortal servants” stories don’t really question that either; they’re more interested if the robots can or should transcend humans.  “Just a tool” stories don’t address the question at all.

The good news is that I feel like these questions are becoming more popular in films of today.  “Automata”, “Her”, “Lars and the Real Girl”, “Transcendence”, and “Ex Machina” feature the concept of inanimate objects bearing semblences of life. “Lars and the Real Girl” in particular, asks these questions (perhaps not overtly), because the main character imagines Bianca to be alive, and the supporting characters actually play along with this fiction.

While movies like “Big Hero 6”, “Wall-E”, and “Robot and Frank”, all have robots necessary to their storyline, I don’t think they ask these questions well, if indeed they ask them at all.  They all are under the heading of “immortal servants”, and their legitimacy as standards for “what makes someone alive” are not really questioned.  In some cases, the fact that they are machines is purely incidental.

If humans are complex machines, could we make a machine complex enough to be considered alive?  Would we have to expand our definition of “life”?  How would they judge the human race?  Will they, indeed, judge the human race unworthy?  Will they become another ally?  Will they supplant us?  Would that be a bad thing?

These are the questions I want to see asked, and I’d be interested in what people will have to say.

An Update

I have a lot of ideas, and I'd like to keep them separate so they'll have at least a passing nod to organization, however working on so much all at once tends to... get me less focused.

For that reason I'm repurposing this blog to pretty much everything I'm currently I'm working on.  Steel and Wire, The Father's Realm, The Chronicles of Melanchoir, The Android Chronicles, Man of Bel'Tasq, and anything else that comes across this scumbag brain of mine will be all consolidated here.  I'll also be posting little vignettes on the writing process, as well as updates to the random merch I've created.

Longer works will, of course, not be posted here, but shorter pieces may crop up from time to time, which may or may not be of the sci-fi/fantasy persuasion.  

Ron Carlson said that I need to mature more as a writer, and work on writing things without sci-fi/supernatural elements.  Setting aside my belief that I think he has an overall disparaging view on the fantasy genre, I think he has a point: I need to learn how to write a story first, and fantastical elements can easily distract from the storytelling process.

Right now I'm reading the two books (Caitlyn Horrock's "This Is Not Your City", and David Means's "The Spot") he required us to read from the creative writing class I took with him years ago, and reading Thomas C. Foster's "How to Read Literature Like A Professor" as well.  My goal is to be a better reader, and better writer.  Not to mention that those books had some... haunting qualities in their storytelling, and require a second examination.

I'll also be trying to make weekly updates on Thursdays, and stream of consciousness posts on Saturdays and Sundays (maybe).

Keeping in mind that working full-time means at least 40 hours a week, I need to be working that many hours a week if I really want to make this my profession.

Wish me luck.  And see you tomorrow.

My Sentences Aren't (Usually) Run-Ons

Back in my sophomore year of high school (13 years ago), I was getting taught how to recongnize, reconstruct, and eliminate a run-on sentence.  One example I was given was (I think) a sentence from William Faulkner’s Absolam! Absolam!  The sentence went on for a page and a half.

A page.  And a half.

One sentence.  A page and a half.

Obviously, when it comes to writing, there are times when one follows the rules and other times you bend, or outright break, the rules.  The sentence fragments above are examples of that.

This leads me to a lot of costernation when a lot of people comment that my stories have run-ons. 

PEOPLE, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY AND GOOD, STOP ABUSING THE DEFINITION OF A “RUN-ON SENTENCE”.

A run-on sentence is a sentence which has more than one independent clause.  In more simplistic terms, it is a sentence that has more than one part which can stand on its own.  For example:

He tried to start the car, the engine turned over then sputtered out.

If you can take the first portion of that sentence, then change that comma to a period and capitalize appropriately, you’d have two separate thoughts, two separate sentences.  It will no longer be a run-on.

He tried to start the car.  The engine turned over then sputtered out.

Separating the sentence into two isn't the only available option; the thoughts can be interconnected by changing it a little, while keeping it from being a run-on.  For example:

He tried to start the car, but the engine turned over then sputtered out.

If you add a conjunction like “and”, “but”, “so”, et cetera to “smooth it out”, it no longer is a run-on, just a more complex sentence.  Because of the nature and structure of English, there is no actual limit to how long you can make a sentence.  There are several tricks you can use to make the sentence longer but still keep it grammatically sound.  For example:

He tried to start the car, panic gripping his throat, stomach clenching and legs shaking as he fruitlessly rotated the key in the ignition between his thumb and forefinger, over and over again, imploring the solenoid to kick in, demanding the electric starter motor to spin the inert flywheel, begging the fuel injectors to spit their gasoline and the spark plugs to ignite flammable vapor, but the engine only turned over then sputtered out.

As far as I can tell, this 75-word sentence is all correctly punctuated. It’s not a run-on, just very long (and somewhat bumpy).

I’m not too sure why people look at very long sentences and just assume “run-on”.  My best guess is that because I have not mastered writing enough to make a sentence “flow” well, no matter the length, people start reading a long sentence, get distracted, lose concentration, and cry “Run-on! This is a run-on!”

It’s very annoying.

This is a recurring problem with intuitive/stream of consciousness writers like myself: we tend to start a sentence and just keep going with the thought until we find a satisfying enough conclusion to end it.  I’m not too sure how the structure-heavy writers construct a sentence; all I know is to write how my thoughts think and try to follow where it leads. 

Reviewing a sentence afterwards also ups my word count in a sentence, as I think about more details and to try to be as clear as possible in my thought.  This leads me to write sentences which sometimes seem disjointed somewhere in the middle, as going back and picking up the rhthym of the thought breaks the already established pattern within the construct, and makes editing to maintain the same voice and style difficult.

The good news is that I’m in good company when it comes to long elocutions; WB Yeats, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and even a 13-year-old George R R Martin were known to wax loquatious in their writing.  Great writing, then, doesn’t need to be constrained by its structual length, but by the poetry in its construction and the purpose it serves within the larger story.  My hope is that one day I can write sentences so well that people won’t notice their length—until they realize they have to take a breath.