I, Poe-bot

As previously mentioned, The Force Awakens is up against another Oscar Isaac feature, Ex Machina, for the Visual Effects Academy Award. Ex Machina, in terms of effects and composition, is basically the exact opposite of TFA: where the Star Wars effects are all majesty and scale, Ex Machina's visual effects are intricate and precise--tiny moving parts and glimmering spider-threads of lights that quietly whir and buzz beneath the transparent synthetic skin of Ava, the Clockwork Girl. The visual effects of Ex Machina are truly arresting, and while I don't necessarily expect it to get the award, it is definitely a memorable work of art.

You can tell by now that I love Ex Machina. It's a claustrophobic, paranoid, and contemplative film about artificial intelligence and human emotion and the uncharted tidal waters where the two bleed into each other. Alex Garland wrote and directed Ex Machina, and it had the same old-school classic sci-fi thriller feel of 2007's Sunshine, which he also wrote and which I also loved.

The tiny cast of Ex Machina is amazing. Alicia Vikander is so great as Ava, a cunning artificial intelligence who has a chilling agenda of her own--or maybe she just thinks it's her own? General Hux plays the hapless subject of a Turing test that is not at all what it seems.

Our boy Oscar Isaac stars as an odious and narcissistic tech bro demon-god... and manages to make casual sleaze, pathetic self-destruction, and pathological self-aggrandizement hopelessly sexy. I hate myself for finding the character so attractive, but just look at him:

More like SEX Machina, amirite?

THOSE MOVES. Not fair, Mr. Isaac, not fair at all.

Probably goes without saying that the film has no LGBT characters. But when you think about it, the entire plot is based upon the work of an LGBT icon, Alan Turing. As you'll recall, Turing basically invented computers and was the subject of the biopic The Imitation Game, which won last year's Academy Award for writing and was nominated in a slew of other categories. The story is a tragic one, ultimately, as Turing's reward for revolutionizing technology and human experience was chemical castration, his sentence for the crime of being gay. But through it all, Turing's unfailing devotion to the memory of a childhood crush, who he memorialized/deified as a computer, was beautifully played by Benedict Cumberbatch.

And Ex Machina examines the questions that Turing's own longing and creativity raised: What is it about creating thinking machines that we find so irresistible? Why are we so drawn to the idea of artificial constructs that we can love or lust after? Maybe it's the idea that we can love them while closely controlling them to eliminate the risk of heartbreak, rejection, disappointment, or loss? Why do we aspire so greedily to create an intelligence that can fool us into thinking it's human, but then not be willing to extend to the intelligence the humanity we so desperately want it to emulate?

Like all good sci-fi, Ex Machina is thought-provoking in addition to being fun to watch. Support this film--we need more like it.