Andy Weir, Drew Goddard, and Ridley Scott, 2015

#32, 2015 Skandies

Saving Space-Private Ryan!  I watched this because it is relevant to my interests: back in high school I actually did my Interna­tional Baccalaureate research paper on the potential colonization of Mars.  So, yeah, as an exploration of what it might be like to have to survive on Mars for the many months it would take to establish contact with Mission Control and put a rescue plan in motion, encountering and solving problems along the way, The Martian is very absorbing.  But it’s quite different from what I had imagined.  In a sense, it’s sort of the flip side of the Contact movie.  The Carl Sagan novel on which that film was based had many nations collaborating on a huge project to send a small mob of scientists on the big mission to travel through the portal to Vega, and it was about what it was about: what actual contact with extraterrestrial intelligence might be like.  The film pares the travelers down to one, traveling as part of a secret project funded by an eccentric billionaire, and it actually has a theme beyond the space adventure.  It’s about a lonely orphan who has turned to the stars to try to make some sort of contact because searching for it here on Earth hasn’t worked out for her.  When I heard the premise of The Martian, I imagined that it too would explore the theme of loneliness, as its protagonist finds himself marooned on a cold desert planet, a hundred million miles from the nearest heartbeat.  But no⁠—he’s a sanguine guy who gets down to work, all but whistling a jaunty tune, and pretty soon he is collaborating with a big team on the rescue mission while millions of people fill the streets to watch events unfold on big screens.  Nothing inherently wrong with that, though it speaks to me less.  But cramming all these characters into a feature film does come at a cost, as we don’t really get to know any of them in any real depth.  Though I guess I can’t blame the medium and its short running time for this one, since I saw that Ellie had the novel sitting on her bookshelf, and when I browsed through it, I found that it had the same faults as the film, both in its lack of thematic content and in the shortcuts it took in establishing characters.  “Hmm, the captain of the mission is a pretty impor­tant character⁠—she probably shouldn’t be a cipher. What can we do to give her a personality?”  “Uh… she likes disco music?”  “Perfect! Characterization: complete!”

Alex Garland, 2014

#47, 2015 Skandies

Yeah, this one uses the same weird font as The Martian.  Appar­ently it’s called “Idler Inner”.  So was there a big Idler Inner craze in the mid-2010s?  Nah: the same guy, one Matt Curtis, did the credits for both movies.  I guess he wanted to get his money’s worth before the license ran out.

Anyway, so this one presents us with what has become a well-worn scenario, as seen in, e.g., Her: it’s twenty minutes into the future, and Big Tech has developed artificial intelligence that can pass for human⁠—A.I. that can be customized to become the per­fect companion, and can more specifically be customized to become the dream girl for a lonely boy who’s been unlucky in love.  But is “she” really someone he can treat as an equal?  Or will she forever be less than human, just a tangle of wires and algo­rithms?  Or… might their relationship be doomed from the start because he is only human, and she is much more?

The wrinkle here is that the A.I. is still in the prototype stage, and the techbro billionaire who created it has brought one of his employees to his lavishly appointed bunker, accessible only by helicopter, to give it a test run.  Though the employee (Caleb) initially believes that he’s won a sweepstakes in a random draw, the billionaire (Nathan) soon confesses that the draw was actually rigged and Caleb has been brought in as an expert to subject the A.I. (Ava) to a variation on the Turing Test.  spoilers start
   here It turns out (and I guess that means it’s sled time) that Nathan is actually testing whether Ava is advanced enough to attempt to use her feminine wiles to manipulate the sad sack Caleb into helping her escape.  So it’s a triangle rather than just a two-hander, and the focal relation­ship is actually the one between the two men.  And that relation­ship is thoroughly, uh, I don’t know how to finish this sentence because I am sick of the word “toxic” and don’t want to use it.  It’s a mentoring relationship, more or less, except Nathan is one of those swaggering assholes who turn the mentoring into a tiresome series of power games.  Consider this exchange:

So not only does Nathan adopt a belittling tone during this (and every other) conversation, making it clear that he thinks he is smart and Caleb is dumb, but he also:

• credits himself with such a powerful intellect that he can see right through Caleb’s circumlocutions to discern his real motivations;

• demonstrates that, even if he is right (which he isn’t), he intends to plow through the timidity that led Caleb to use those circumlocutions in the first place, which is a dick move; and

• steers the conversation toward crude “locker room talk” (as Trump put it in 2016), both in order to further heighten Caleb’s discomfort and to try to get him complicit in think­ing of Ava as a thing to be used, not insofar as she is a robot, but insofar as she is female.

Several reviews complained that Ex Machina is misogynistic, and not just because the premise is that a techbro billionaire has been building a series of steadily more advanced sexbots.  There’s a real philosophical conundrum here⁠—at what point can an arti­ficial intelligence be said to be sentient, and therefore no longer an appliance but a slave?⁠—but because all of the A.I.s in the movie are female, this more literal theme takes a back seat to its metaphorical implications about the positions of the sexes in society.  By having Ava kill both Nathan and Caleb, these critics contend, the film implies that Nathan’s central sin⁠—keeping his harem im­prisoned in tiny containment rooms⁠—was justified all along, and that, by extension, so are the millennia of subjugation to which women have been subjected.  A fair critique, though I would add an objection of my own.  After nearly an hour of tossing around the question of whether Ava is truly conscious and likes Caleb or whether she is a just a machine running some code⁠—flirting on the outside but blank on the inside, an inter­active fiction non-player character writ large⁠—the film puts forward its big twist, as Nathan suggests a third possibility: what if she is indeed conscious and is feigning her affections for Caleb, in order to turn him into a tool in her escape plan?  Or as some reviews have put it: what if Nathan has created a truly conscious A.I., but it’s a sociopath?  And while Ava’s indifference to the life of her ally, as well as the way she blithely plunders her “sisters” for parts, suggests that she is indeed a sociopath, I do wonder about the suggestion that there’s a slippery slope between a bit of play-acting and outright sociopathy.  One of the head games Nathan plays is that, every time Caleb tries to slip into a more formal social role⁠—employee to employer, student to teacher⁠—Nathan punctures the attempt: “I want to have a beer and a conversation with you, not a seminar.” “Lay off the textbook approach!” “Can we just be two guys?” Why such an aversion to a little bit of pretense?  Is it wrong for a server at a restaurant to be exuberantly friendly, or even a little flirtatious, in the hope of receiving a bigger tip?  The December after I got my license, when my father had me drive around Orange County dropping off gift baskets at dozens of medical offices, not because he was overflowing with Christmas spirit, but in the hope that those offices would refer some patients to his practice in the year to come… was that wrong?  Or, closer to home: what about the teacher who, while inwardly grinding her teeth in frustration at a student’s obtuseness, remains outwardly cheerful and encour­aging?  Doesn’t a little inauthenticity actually make for a better experience at a restaurant, or at the office, or at school?  And what’s the alternative?  Like, you can’t expect that at a workplace of any significant size everyone is going to like one another, but you’ve got serious dysfunction if colleagues are treating each other with hostility.  Over the years, I’ve had many co‑workers I thought were genuinely awesome people, but I’ve also had some that I’ve kind of despised.  I don’t think the people in that latter group knew how I really felt about them, since I have tried to be friendly or at least civil to everyone I’ve worked with.  If they did know, they didn’t indicate it to me, which makes the same point via a different route.  So, yeah, while I actually thought that this movie was pretty okay all in all, I do find it thematically ques­tionable in a few ways.  Oh, no, when we develop A.I. we won’t be able to tell what it’s thinking!  Well… we can’t really tell what anyone’s really thinking, and that’s usually kind of okay.

Oh, also, pretty much every review went crazy for the disco dancing scene and it did nothing for me.  Like, I don’t really get dancing in general, but in particular I don’t get the “zomg they’re dancing!! squeee!” reflex that so many people seem to have.  In any event, Scott McCloud already covered this territory, so I didn’t need to see it again.

"Metal" (Poppy, 2018)

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