dvd of the week
Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a contest to spend a week with reclusive, eccentric genius Nathan (Oscar Isaac) at his estate in a nameless, northern mountain valley. Caleb, slight and pale and stereotypically nerdy, is perhaps more ill at ease by Nathan’s masculine aggression than his genius. He seems more comfortable with Ava, the android artificial intelligence that Nathan had brought Caleb to give the Turing Test, the procedure devised by Alan Turing to determine whether an intelligence is human or computerized. Ava (Alicia Vikander) is stunning, both for her beauty but also for her human qualities: surprise, humor, sadness, curiosity and love. Caleb is astonished and clearly infatuated, and then Ava tells Caleb not to trust anything Nathan says. Alex Garland, celebrated writer of the novels The Beach and The Tesseract and the films 28 Days Later and Sunshine, is making his directorial debut with Ex Machina, and it is a pretty stunning start.
