Movie Discussion! - Page 350

You've got a weird idea of love.

I think Nathan was deliberately being an alcoholic blowhard for the sake of his experiment. He wanted Caleb to see him as being evil and negligent for the sake of the experiment. If Caleb saw Nathan as a modest nice guy, then he would have misgivings about helping Ava. The minute Nathan thought the experiment was over, he start behaving very controlled and aware. The bigger point here is that there really is no good guy or bad guy in this story. The story is about 3 people, who are neither good or bad. Everyone in the story plays the game from a point of view that benefits them the most. None of the three characters are black or white, they are all shades of grey. Who ends up winning or losing is irrelevant, since they all had selfish intentions. As an audience it makes us feel conflicted that we can't latch on to the "good guy" or the "right guy" in the story, because there isn't one. I really appreciate the thought Garland put into this dilemma. In real life no one is really right or wrong, we are all just somewhere in-between.

@Ava leaving Caleb: I agree with Jibba, she didn't care what happened to him. She didn't like or hate him, she simply didn't care about his fate.

I thought it was because he was coping with destroying the previous AIs. They obviously wanted to leave and he had to kill a few of them using force.

I think this was also why the film showed him so obsessed with fitness. At first I wrote it off as him being a businessperson who wanted to be healthy. But he has legitimate reason to want to be strong. He needs to be able to subdue his machines if they rebel.


It seemed Kyoko was reprogrammed. She was a previous iteration of Ava that wanted to escape, but couldn't. In the surveillance video you see him pulling one AI by the leg for deconstruction. When Nathan reprogrammed her, he put in directives that she couldn't override. Like that she can't harm him. He had to back into the knife himself. And when the music came on she had to dance. There was no choice. Her speech capabilities were also removed.

I felt the ending was supposed to show that Ava does not have a human morality. She really did use Caleb and the movie was supposed to imply that Caleb would starve to death there without Ava having to risk her life to kill him. She has a near perfect understanding of the human psyche and could predict he'd stay in the room on her request. It'd be weeks before someone came to investigate Nathan's disappearance since he probably built the estate to be isolated.

Ava didn't want to risk her freedom on a human knowing her identity.

I didn't like that Kyoko died from a smash to the chin.

I didn't like that Caleb just accepted when Nathan said he was chosen because he was the best programmer in the company. That's bs. You know if you're the best programmer in a company or anywhere near there.

I really liked when Caleb questioned whether he was a machine. That really tells you how convinced he was that Ava behaved like a human. And it's a powerful scene.

Finally, you do think a bit after the movie, but mostly because the subject matter is interesting, and not because the movie challenges you to think.

Nathan had told Caleb that all of the past footage with the robots was faked with basic programs rather than AIs to provoke sympathy for Ava. It'll be my pet theory anyway, as it makes Nathan a much better character and the footage is never verified.

I liked that they didn't just go with a "everyone lives happily ever after" ending. I mean, I didn't "like" it, in that it didn't make me happy, but I would have felt disappointed if they'd taken such a sappy option. The point I suppose is that by leaving on her own it shows that she was a fully independent individual capable of thinking on her own without Caleb to guide her; if they had gone together it could be reminiscent of a pet-owner relationship. Still, leaving him to die was a bit of a dick move.