Boy Movies #64

I rewatched Ex Machina

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Some housekeeping

First: Buy Boy Movies stickers! They’re still available! I feel like a carnival barker every time I say this, but it’s true, you can still very much buy stickers. Second: I have an announcement, which is that Boy Movies will be changing its posting cadence for the next month or so — I know, I know. After disappearing for two weeks, now I’m springing a change on you? It’s going to be okay. Until sometime in May (I’ll figure out an exact date), new issues will be released every other week, publishing on Fridays rather than Tuesdays. This will probably have very little impact on your life, but I thought I’d let you know anyway. I’ll be back in your inbox on April 12th! If you’re desperate to hear from me in the meantime, I’m always on Letterboxd.

Fuckin’ unreal

If you haven’t heard, A24 is re-releasing a fairly random trio of films in IMAX: Ex Machina, Hereditary, and Uncut Gems. No word on when I can expect the Laggies IMAX re-release, but I eagerly await the announcement. Anyway, they really got me with this one! Seeing Hereditary once was more than enough for one lifetime, but the other night I saw Ex Machina and I booked my Uncut Gems tickets the literal second they went on sale. (More on that in May…) Inside the cursed Times Square AMC, from which you are forced to exit through a Dave & Buster’s and was at one point allegedly overrun with bed bugs, I watched Alex Garland’s directorial debut for the first time since its release in 2015. 

It’s hard to overemphasize the fact that, at the time, Ex Machina was the epitome of modern feminist cinema. I’m being hyperbolic but I’m not. The film, about a coder (Domhnall Gleeson, sadly left behind in the mass celebration of Irish actors) who believes he’s won a contest to spend a week at the estate of an eccentric tech CEO (Oscar Isaac, in the last gasp before he stopped making movies for adults) with the goal of administering the Turing test to the CEO’s sexy AI lady creation (Alicia Vikander; memba her?), was the first in a trio of boy-coded feminist movies released that year, alongside Mad Max: Fury Road and Magic Mike XXL. This was also the year of Spy (women can be James Bond too) and Carol (women are lesbians, even if they’re married to Kyle Chandler).

Look, I don’t mean to sound reductive. All of the movies I just listed are good, and I would consider all but one¹ of them some of my absolute favorites of the 2010s. When these films came into the world, we as a culture were only a few years separated from people buying pastel colored “misandry” stickers off Etsy. But “oppressor” was a big word around this time, and these modern stories of women pushing back against their oppressors held a lot of weight. (It’s worth noting that every single one of these films were directed by men, of course.) I went into the Ex Machina re-release wondering if Garland’s perspective on this idea of “women’s liberation” (for lack of any better phrasing and for the sake of committing to the 2015 bit, sorry) would stand the test of time, or if the film’s central theme would fall flat. I’m not here to be the “this doesn’t hold up” police, because I mostly find that to be an extremely boring conversation, but what does interest me is the realization that we haven’t really progressed or moved on from the moment in which Ex Machina existed.

What compels a male director to have a feminist awakening while still creating something that exists within the boy movie realm? Make no mistake that Ex Machina is a boy movie. It’s very Good For Her, but it’s also about the hubris of men, and it features so very many shots of naked women². It’s about AI, something men love. J. Robert Oppenheimer is quoted and name dropped. (That guy is everywhere…) Nathan, the antagonist and simultaneously the most interesting character, is a guy who only could’ve been created by another man — blame it on Oscar Isaac’s charm, but there’s still something alluring about him, under all that sinister slime. Ava tricking Caleb into believing she cares about running away with him is something that would only happen because, as the film explicitly tells us, Caleb is a lonely heterosexual man. (Caleb is also the prototypical Nice Guy — remember when every movie About Feminism had a Nice Guy?) Ava was built off an idea of Caleb’s literal porn fantasy and unexpectedly got so smart that she decided she wanted independence. We don’t see anything from her perspective until the switch has been flipped, so to speak. The bulk of her development happens off screen, before the film even begins: She’s already decided before meeting Caleb that she hates her creator, that she wants to leave the glass box he’d imprisoned her in. Caleb’s just there to open the door, before getting trapped behind it himself. 

What tripped me up was how much Ex Machina reminded me of this past year’s Poor Things, a movie that sucks. I remember leaving Poor Things and telling a friend that it felt like a film that should have come out in 2015 without even realizing how much I meant it until I revisited Ex Machina. Again, I’m not trying to sound reductive, but they have the same general concept: Man creates hot baby woman, hot baby woman grows a brain and rebels. There’s an innocence to Emma Stone’s hot baby woman and to Alicia Vikander’s hot baby (robot) woman that Yorgos Lanthimos and Garland are clearly fascinated by. There’s an innocence, of course, until the moment they snap. And when they snap… brother, watch out! Etcetera, etcetera. We’ve been down this road many times, and the success of Poor Things is likely a harbinger of more stories of this nature to come. I don’t think it’s, like, morally wrong for male directors to make these movies, or to make a boy movie out of a “girl story,” but the least they could do is try to build on the groundwork Ex Machina laid rather than, almost a decade later, continuing to do a worse imitation of it.

1. Anyone who guesses correctly gets a prize.

2. Don’t even get me started on Sonoya Mizuno’s Kyoko, a mute Asian robot who Oscar Isaac exclusively uses for sex and housework and eventually murders. Sure, she gets to literally stab him in the back first — this is not a subtle film — but…