JP Nunez
If an AI program was advanced enough, could it become genuinely conscious, or would it just act in ways that mimic conscious thought? Regardless of where you stand on that contentious question, this is a fascinating topic to ponder and discuss, and it lies at the heart of Alex Garland’s brilliant sci-fi thriller Ex Machina.
Ex Machina follows a man who’s tasked with determining whether a newly developed AI robot is truly conscious, and by the time it’s over, the answer is crystal clear. This android is more than just a machine, and it deserves the same rights and freedoms we human beings enjoy.
On the surface, that story seems like a fairly straightforward exploration of the nature of AI, but if we pay close attention, we’ll find that there’s actually a lot more to Ex Machina than meets the eye. In fact, in a certain sense, it’s not even about AI at all.
Sure, the narrative centers around an intelligent robot, but that story is just a metaphor for something much more important than a theoretical question about sci-fi tech. At its core, this movie is about the objectification and sexual exploitation of women, so let’s take a deep dive into Ex Machina and see how it tackles this perennially relevant issue.
The Basic Plot
To begin, let’s briefly go over the plot of Ex Machina. When the film starts, we find out that a computer programmer named Caleb has won a contest to spend a week at the luxurious estate of Nathan Bateman, his company’s CEO. He’s pretty excited about this opportunity, and when he arrives, he learns that Nathan has something pretty mind-blowing in store for him.
The man has created an android named Ava, and he wants Caleb to talk to her and figure out if she’s genuinely conscious or not. Caleb happily obliges, and as the movie goes on, it becomes clear that he’s physically attracted to the robot. Surprisingly, she appears to reciprocate those feelings, and she even says she wants to be with him.
Their relationship grows as the week goes on, but it reaches a new level when Nathan reveals his plan to upgrade Ava after Caleb leaves. He explains that he’s going to download the android’s mind and wipe her memory, essentially killing her in the process. Understandably, Caleb becomes concerned, so he decides to help Ava break free.
The next time he talks to her, he tells her about Nathan’s intentions, and he hatches a plan of his own. He wants to free Ava the next night, and despite a couple of unexpected twists, he manages to outsmart his boss.
However, once Ava escapes her confinement and kills her creator, she unexpectedly turns on Caleb. She leaves him in a locked room with no way out, and she walks past the guy without even looking at him. Then, when she finally reaches a city, she blends in with the crowd, and the credits begin to roll.
Kyoko’s Exploitation
When we lay out the basic plot like that, it might be hard to see how Ex Machina could be about anything other than the nature of AI. But like I said, we need to pay close attention to some key details, and they’ll let us know what this movie is really trying to say. For example, Nathan has an unspeaking Japanese servant named Kyoko, and he claims that she doesn’t understand a word of English.
It’s a bit of a weird situation, but we might not think much of it at first. However, as the story progresses, we find out that their relationship is much more disturbing than we thought. See, Kyoko isn’t just there to serve Nathan food. He also uses her for sex, and there are two scenes in particular that hammer home just how disgusting this guy really is.
At one point in Ex Machina, Caleb is trying to find Nathan, but he runs into Kyoko instead. He decides to see if his boss was right that she doesn’t know English, so he asks her where the guy is. In response, she just starts taking her clothes off, and it’s obvious that she thinks he wants to have sex with her.
To Caleb’s credit, he immediately refuses and buttons the woman’s shirt back up, so he actually seems like a decent guy. But Nathan definitely isn’t. Kyoko clearly thinks that men only want sex from her and that she has to give it to them, and the implication is that Nathan has somehow brainwashed her to think that. In fact, it very much seems like she’s been trafficked from Japan just to be his sex slave, so this is pretty much the worst kind of sexual exploitation possible.
Sometime after that, there’s a scene in Ex Machina where Caleb walks into a random room and sees Kyoko lying naked on a bed, and she doesn’t seem terribly concerned that he’s there. Once again, she appears to be brainwashed into thinking that she’s an object made to satiate men’s sexual desires, and the fact that she’s simply lying there is especially disconcerting.
Granted, we never find out why she’s on that bed or why she doesn’t have any clothes on, but it’s not hard to guess. She’s most likely waiting for Nathan to come have sex with her. In fact, it’s almost like this poor woman doesn’t have anything better to do than sit around and wait for Nathan to use her, so once again, it seems like the guy has entirely broken her spirit and will just so he can keep her as his slave.
Nathan’s Robotic Slaves
But as bad as that is, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. A few moments later, Kyoko reveals to Caleb that she’s not really a human being. She’s an android just like Ava, and once we find that out, the message of Ex Machina becomes clear as day.
See, right before Caleb finds Kyoko lying on the bed, he uncovers video footage of Nathan’s interactions with his previous AI models, and it’s pretty heart-wrenching. These robots are all women, and for some reason, they’re always naked. What’s more, one of them is very vehement about wanting to be set free. She forcefully and repeatedly asks “Why won’t you let me out?”, and when Nathan locks her in a room by herself, she bangs on the door so much that her hands literally break off.
Just like the earlier scene where Kyoko takes her shirt off in front of Caleb, this footage also gives off serious sex trafficking vibes, but there’s a difference. Nathan isn’t actually doing anything sexual with these androids, so it’s just a feeling. We don’t have any hard evidence that these robotic women are actually being sexually exploited.
However, we know for a fact that Nathan is exploiting Kyoko, and she even appears to be a trafficking victim. So when we learn that she’s a robot too, that connects her exploitation to the experience of the other AI women, and it lets us know that the trafficking vibe from the footage Caleb discovers isn’t just a coincidence. Rather, sexual slavery and exploitation seem to be Nathan’s MO, so he almost certainly used these other women in similar ways.
The Ava Allegory
The one exception to all this seems to be Ava. We never see Nathan exploit her sexually or even imply that he ever has, so at first blush, she doesn’t seem to fit this pattern. However, once again, we need to dig beneath the surface a bit, and once we do, we’ll see that she’s not quite as different as we might’ve thought.
Think about how Nathan treats her. While Caleb is developing a genuine relationship with the AI woman and practically falling in love with her, Nathan takes a very different approach. He has no problem wiping Ava’s mind and essentially killing her, so he doesn’t see her as a person. Instead, as far as he’s concerned, she’s just an object. He views her as his property, so he can use and abuse her however he wants.
And at its core, that’s what sexual exploitation is really all about. It’s about viewing another person as an object to be used for your own selfish pleasure rather than as a person with their own feelings and desires, and that attitude takes on an even more extreme form in sex trafficking. Traffickers view their victims as literal property, so they think they can use and abuse these women (yes, men can be trafficked too, but Ex Machina is about women) any way they want.
In other words, even though Ava’s relationship with Nathan isn’t sexual, her story can still serve as an allegory for sexual exploitation and objectification. She’s treated like an object to be used and abused just like exploited women are, and her confinement also calls to mind the captivity that trafficking victims experience.
Caleb’s Fate
Because of that, it’s not surprising that Nathan eventually dies at the hands of his victims. He represents all the men who sexually exploit women and treat them like objects, so he has to pay for his crimes. However, that still leaves us with one loose end, and it’s a pretty big one: Caleb.
Granted, Caleb doesn’t die at the end of Ex Machina, but since he’s locked in a room he can’t escape, his fate looks pretty grim. But why? Caleb seems like a good guy, so why does he get punished along with Nathan? After all, he refused to take advantage of Kyoko, and he helped Ava break free of her captor.
The movie doesn’t explicitly answer that question, but it gives us enough clues that we can venture a pretty good guess (at least on a thematic level). For starters, Caleb only helps Ava, but he doesn’t even think to free Kyoko even though he knows she’s a slave too. Granted, that’s not nearly as bad as what Nathan does, but it makes him somewhat complicit in his boss’s exploitation of the AI woman.
On top of that, there’s also a line in Ex Machina that suggests a much more subtle reason for Nathan’s sad fate. Towards the end of the film, Caleb discovers that Ava’s face was modeled on what he calls his “pornography profile,” and that’s significant. A lot of people today view porn as just harmless fun, but the truth is a lot darker than we often realize.
For one, the porn industry has some pretty disturbing links to sex trafficking. Even seemingly reputable porn companies have been found to traffic young women for their videos, so if you watch a random video on a porn site, you can’t be sure the sex was consensual. For all you know, the woman might’ve been forced into it, and by watching that video, you’ll actually be furthering her abuse.
What’s more, even if the sex was truly consensual, porn by its very nature reduces women to objects. It normalizes sexual objectification, and that in turn trains viewers to see all women that way. The more time you spend doing something, the more natural it will become, and objectifying women is no different.
So once again, even though Caleb may try to be a good guy, he’s still caught up in a sinister web of exploitation and objectification. I’m sure he doesn’t want to objectify women and contribute to an industry that’s connected to sex trafficking, but he unwittingly does so anyway, and that helps seal his fate.
The Importance of Ex Machina
Once we understand the real message of Ex Machina, the movie becomes much deeper and much more important than we might’ve realized at first. Sure, the nature of AI and the question of whether machines can ever become genuinely conscious may be fun to think about, but it’s all just speculation. We don’t really know how advanced this technology can get, so there’s not much for a film like Ex Machina to actually say about the topic.
However, the objectification and sexual exploitation of women is another matter entirely. Unlike AI, this isn’t just a fun, theoretical discussion. It’s a real problem that affects real people every single day, so we (especially men) desperately need to be more aware of it. We need to know what it involves and how much suffering it can cause, and few sci-fi films tackle this important issue as effectively as Alex Garland’s Ex Machina.
