MOVIE: Ex Machina (Pygmalion)

There's a wonderful greek myth about a master sculptor who makes a perfect woman out of clay. Or carves her out of marble. She's so perfect, and he puts so much of his soul into the work that she becomes alive. And kills him. Because that's how Greek myths go. Its all about the hubris and punishment. Trying always leads to failure and suffering. This explains Greece really well.

Ex Machina is a scifi version of Pygmalion. Its also how Millenials view my generation. If you happen to be a Millenial this movie should embrace or enhance your existing paranoia and hatred to older people like me.

Its also very artsy. Like swedish crime dramas. Filmed in Norway in the Fjords (which we pine for), and on sets with green screens in the background and a certain amount of blue filters, it reminds me of Moon with the soundtrack from the new remake of Tron. All electronic ambient throbbing and minimalism. It works for the story, but its also very dry. This suits the picture, because there's only a few characters so its like a play. More than Pygmalion, but less than My Fair Lady, which is Pymalion's more recent remake in the 1960's, based on the comedy rewrite by noted author George Bernard Shaw, who set that version in London. And nobody died in that version, though the musical gave us a cockney version of Audrey Hepburn singing "wouldn't it be lover-ly".

Julie Andrews did the play in London for years and was banned from the movie role because she was already up for an Oscar for some movie called "The Sound of Music" which came out that same year. They said it would be too confusing to moviegoers. So they hired a blue-blood from Belgium, Audrey Hepburn, technically a dutchess I think? Something like that. And her parents were Nazi sympathizers, but she worked for the resistance, because childhood rebellion. Whatever.

I think this is why the android in the film Ex Machina sort of resembles Hepburn. She's just winsome enough. I think this is a decent scifi take on the ancient Greek myth, and we'll probably see more of these in coming years. AI scares people. The technology to make them doesn't exist yet, but maybe someday. And even then, they might not be stable enough to last very long. Or even very plausibly human. The AI in this story is an android, which is much easier to design for, but silly in computer science. If you want a more complex version of AI, read Neuromancer, from back in 1983. That's an AI to be concerned about. That one is more alien and plausible than a machine in a body that wants to be free.