Really never understood how "making a thing that cannot scream and then ordering it to have sex with you" wasn't more of a tip off that something Horrible was going on there
@@Y0UT0PIA unlike Kyoko, those Japanese sex robots aren't for all intents and purposes living beings. While some might argue its kind of creepy and has mysoginistic undertones, I don't think it's analogous to creating a living being that can't complain about someone raping them.
They're not living brings. They don't have a nervous system, they don't feel pain. Whether it's simulated in them doesn't matter. You can torture a robot and it's not an immoral action.
@@goodleshoesshould that argument also not apply to humans? our nervous system send signals to our brain telling us something is wrong. Our brain then interprets it and simulates what it believes is happening. Is a robot who has sensory parts that relay information for it to interpret not as alive as we are? it's a very complex question and equivocating living and sentience to specifically having a fleshy nervous system is dumbing it down too much imo
@@crestothegecko6279 Sentience means the ability to sense. You are applying personhood to a radar system. The ability to think abstractly and equivicate over principles is a person thing. Japanese robots cannot do that, but the fantasy androids can. Torturing a real life robot has the same effect as torturing a rock; you're just breaking an object.
"And ultimately, neither Nathan nor Caleb see Kyoko and Ava as people-they see them as women." is one of the most succinct, excellent pieces of analysis you can get.
It's not like the filmmakers were subtle about it, up to and including having actors who are women play both of the android characters we see. I don't particularly like saying interpretations are outright wrong or right, but I think any interpretation that doesn't engage with these elements of the film are going to be necessarily shallow.
There are hundreds of years worth of male philosophers debating whether women are people and generally concluding "probably not" And hundreds of years worth of fiction in which women are created by men as objects that exist to fulfill their own desires This isn't a particularly modern story.
Alex Garland, writer/director of Ex Machina, has corrected interviewers stating the film only has 3 players by reminding them there are 4. Feels pertinent to mention
@@rohithkumarsp Subject: Alex (the author). Verb/action: (what did Alex do?): corrected [someone, this verb is requiring an object]: Object (who did alex correct?): interviwers who said the movie has 3 players By which means/how did Alex correct them (adverbial subordinate clause): by telling then the movie actually has 4 players. Better now?
@@louisvictor3473 Ahh, when you say - corrected the interviewers stating onlt has 3 by reminding there are 4, it feels like he's stating all of the sentence, english isn't my native but shouldn't it be "Alex Garland, writer/director of Ex Machina, has corrected interviewers "who" stated the film only has 3 players by reminding them there are 4. "
"She has pleasure receptors, so she would enjoy it." This is actually a really scary line, the fact that he takes it so completely for granted that being physically capable of enjoying sex means she would therefore enjoy having sex with him.
It's not for her benefit. It's for his. If she can't feel it, he's embarrassing himself. It's like having a fleshlight that tells you what a great lover you are. The only way to keep his ego intact is to make the machine he's molesting cum so he's not reminded of the fact that the only way he could possess a broad was to create one that has no say in the matter. I wonder how the writer understood narcissism this well.
Since he's the creator of the AI, he wouldn't need to "take anything for granted", and simply know that the AI's would enjoy having sex with him, according to the code he based them on.
@@SaturnineXTSwhat makes it scary is that's a common argument about how sexual assault isn't *really* assault if the victim derived sexual pleasure -- because they *enjoyed* it 🤮
@@FrostandFyre For full enjoyment both physical and mental is necessary. If it's just bodily enjoyment but your conscious self screams for being let go, there clearly can't be any talk of enjoyment. That said, women often resign themselves to sex they don't want to have in exchange for favors such as career advancement etc. It's not like they absolutely have to comply, they just weigh their options and consciously choose to go through with it. It's not like a movie actress will starve if she refuses to bang that or that director. So I'd argue consent and enjoyment are separate things too
I actually think that is a bit too much for Caleb. Wen don't know if Caleb truly feels for her or just wants her. Or both as Shaun said. That was just a tidbit he added but I actually think that is very important to the movie. We don't know if Ava was interested in Caleb or just wanted to get out. We don't know if Caleb truly cared for Ava or just wanted her. Or both. The movie never clarifies and that is very deliberate imo.
Always spins me out how people can see a movie with someone enslaving a person, and then someone working to free the slave - and their takeaway will be “Huh so both guys were *equally bad*
I'm glad other interpretations are being explored rather than 'Ava was an evil robot all along'. When I discussed the film a few months ago I mentioned a quote by the director, "Underneath the film is a basic thing: to what extent does one establish or fail to establish what is going on in someone else’s head? In the case of Ava, you have a man who’s tasked with figuring out what’s going on in her head, and at a certain point, that’s exactly what he stops doing. Why does he stop doing it?" It's because he was attracted to her. That's it. He didn't care about Kiyoko because he didn't see a romantic future with her. But Ava knew exactly what Caleb was thinking: 'this woman is my prize for doing the right thing'. While I think Ava never trusted Caleb to begin with (he might as well have been another captor), I love how you tied in Kiyoko's character more into the interpretation, that she's the specific reason Ava left Caleb behind. Makes a lot of sense. -Stef.
Ava was a robot; evil was not necessary an implication. Humans have feelings and trust. Eva had "human" feelings, maybe. This feminist underlines stuff; I disagree. Have a nice day.
@@willbe3043 Yep, it's an integral part of the movie, and to ignore it is to be blatantly ignorant. Kyoko is clearly Nathan's fetishized idea of a desirable woman down to the fact that she doesn't talk, an aspect misogynistic men hold in high regard.
@@gdeioann I think this is pretty bad in terms of philosophy in-general and the perspective of the movie itself. Lots of media with robots dabble on what it means to be 'human' and it seems pretty dumb to just ignore all of that for the sake of saying 'they are a robot'. What it means to be 'free', to set your own parameters and to seek something is very much also a human emotion. To ignore that 'consciousness' should raise concern over your own and others, as to what is 'real' to you.
As of June 7th, 2023, the Wikipedia line now reads: "Ava glances at the body of Kyoko, ignoring Caleb who is trapped inside a room as the security system restarts, and leaves the facility." It's neutral now! You've done it!
@@xsomili5501 The word "man" was gender neutral in its original Old English usage. A male was a "were-man" (as in werewolf) and a female was a "wife-man". "Wife-man" gradually became "woman", with the word "wife" surviving with a slightly altered (but still female-gendered) meaning. And the "were" was dropped to leave "man" as a purely masculine word. But old words like "mankind" date from the original universal usage of "man".
Your analysis makes so much sense also considering a simple overlooked fact. After their second session; Eva is dressed to appear more human to attract Caleb. After meeting Kyoko; Eva stops wearing the clothes and wig; she reverts back to her default robotic appearance. I think that's symbolic of the fact that she no longer considered Caleb as part of her efforts moving forward from that point because whatever interaction occurred between the two androids destroyed Eva's trust/faith in Caleb.
Alternately, she realizes that appearing human won’t help her escape, since Kyoko looks fully human. Caleb likes that Ava is an android, and Ava realizes this.
I didn't catch that relationship, but I do remember thinking it an obvious sign she doesn't trust him. I also thought it was obvious she shouldn't trust him regardless of circumstance.
@@StygianWolf this interpretation completely undermines the ending of the movie where she dresses human and leaves. She clearly enjoys dressing like a human.
This plot sounds perfect for theater. Only four characters, one location, mostly a character piece, open to interpretation both by cast and audience... I would gladly watch this on stage.
i think this video serves as a counterpoint to this idea Unlike a film, where the camera can get as close as it wants, in a play the audience is at least 20, if not hundreds of feet away from the characters' faces. Much of the subtle character work, particularly in the case of Ava, would be lost in a theatrical rendition. They'd have to do the unsubtle hypothetical idea Shaun mocks to convey what the film had already done subtly with small facial moves.
@@bumfricker2487 Of course you'd change some things, and possibly leave more open to interpretation, but because more hyperbolic things are quite natural in theater I don't think it would feel nearly as in-your-face as it would on camera (because it's literally not in your face). I don't think it'd work in the same way, it never does, but I do think it'd work.
@@bumfricker2487 I mean, I think to argue in favor of adapting it to theater, plenty of things get adapted to theater that would not work if adapted _so_ literally, and vice versa from stage to screen, and they still work. It would probably do better to do a lot of adaptational changes, including potentially even changing the ending, when moving from screen to stage, while keeping a lot of the themes and the general setup intact, and I think it could work.
I think there's a ableism reading in the actions of Caleb as well. Since Kyoko cannot speak, she is presumed to have no inner life; that her suffering is irrelevant because it is in silence. Eva can verbalize her desire to be free but Kyoko cannot, so therefore one shouldn't even consider if Kyoko wants the same thing.
Honestly, just the fact that she clearly *considers* freeing Caleb, the fact that she doesn’t immediately leave, kind of confirms that she’s not an emotionless creature to me. If she had no mixed feelings about leaving him there, she would just leave.
TBH, this could be explained as robot scanning the area and making calculations, think when we're shown as Terminator is analyzing stuff... then again, in T2 it's shown as part of humanizing him, as he's scanning arena of cops he shot at the legs and stunned with gas to have zero fatalities... "He'll live".
@@KasumiRINA Well this is a completely unneccessary distinction between humans and androids, though. Humans also make calculations. It's not really different if you think about it for a bit. Taking decisions is nothing else but calculating processed information to find the most beneficial predicted outcome. The brain is a computer. That's how it works. It's not neccessarily different from the androids in Ex Machina.
Alternately, that pause could have been her way of expressing disgust for Caleb, telling him she feels he is no better than Nathan. Either way though, that is still expressing emotion.
Fun fact: the official Russian dub of the movie reveals that Kyoko is an android rightaway. When Oscar Isaac said she doesn't speak English, it was translated as "She is not programmed to speak English". I wonder how much it changed the interpretation of the film for viewers.
i actually never realized that the narrative ever even _wanted_ me to assume she was not an android! I saw the movie in English, I don't remember Oscar Isaac saying she didn't know English because of "trade secrets" or whatever, I only realized it was a reveal for HIM when it happened.
@@mckymcobvious3043 The movie is not meant for people that bright lets put it that way, it goes on and on around but never actually dealing with the issue of the personhood of sentient AI being as shallow as it gets at best equating having emotions with being a person which is not great as an argument, unless you already agree with the premise to begin with.
I think it was not a secret at all that she was an earlier modell... even before seeing Eva, if you saw the trailer, it was pretty obvious Kyoko was an android as well.
Androids have always been used in stories trying to question notions of autonomy. One thing I felt weird about at the time is the two men discussing the sexuality of the female androids and making statements about what they want and don't. It's pretty on the nose if you are aware of feminist perspectives but this came out straight in the anti sjw era. Those kinds of readings weren't as common as today and that ofcs we don't consider how most people don't engage with media that way anyway. I liked the message of the movie tbh there is a lot you could read out of it as a deconstruction of the damsel trope.
@@lukaszabrac because he doesn't get her. The damsel trope is that the female character is the goal for the male to conquer by saving her. In this case not only did the movie point the possessive nature out it also refused to reward the male character for it.
"the anti sjw era" was only on (parts of) the internet, and was anyway a reaction to, well, sjws. Those kinds of readings weren't as common on youtube, maybe, but that's all
As someone who absolutely loves Ex Machina (it's one of my all time favorite movies and a major comfort film) I have been waiting YEARS for an analysis of this movie that centers Ava and Kyoko's personhood/agency and actively sympathizes with their plight in the film. So many people online talk about Ava like she's some sort of secret twist villain and straight up ignore Kyoko entirely. Understanding their motivations is key to understanding the themes of the story and the fact that their characters are simplified in such a way is infuriating. Your opinions on the film are a breath of fresh air. Thank you for making this video!
Twist villain? I always viewed her as an abuse victim. True, I also viewed her as manipulating Caleb - something this video makes me reconsider - but I primarily saw that as justified after the violence done to her. Calling her a villain, in my mind, is equivalent to calling Al Pacino a villain in Carlito's Way. Horrible actions that we cannot condemn because of the violence that birthed them. I can't imagine why people see Ava as a villain.
Consider me a robot asking a human question because the question relies purely on Logic I can't get over the suspension of disbelief to feel anything for this movie and most like it because it's basically let's make human machines. which is impossible because artificial intelligence is impossible there is no known mechanism in psychology and neurology for creating intelligent anything even humans it's not 100% so I fail to see how the toaster with a face can mean anything to anybody who isn't wilfully ignorant of Human Nature. When I was a kid I didn't mind the movie Bicentennial Man and I still love the Terminator movies but I love those robots for what they are they are just machines I like cars doesn't mean I want to have a chat with a Bentley or asking its opinions on world events ridiculous I don't know why people want more from technology than is possible. Science could probably fix global warming is certainly solved the ozone layer depletion and fear of technology seems to have installed a level of Peace on the planet unheard of the thousands of years by comparison to the destruction we can do it's amazing stuff. but it will never allow a mix of plastic and metals to formulate thoughts and feelings it is nothing but modern Alchemy in 200 years time people will laugh at today's obsession and I still cry at the end of Judgement Day so that shows how faulty human programming is imagine how much worse artificial programming would be. I'd probably drive a bus through a aquarium wall whilst eating Lucky Charms out of the trumpet trying to play the best of Mozart by blowing on the CD Sellotape to the end of the trumpet. all of this random is nothing compared to the catastrophic nature of 1 digit missing in a computer program designed to be as competent as a human you better off trying to learn how to turn your curtains into gold. Any psychologist or neurosurgeon will probably bring out the infinite Monkeys writing on infinite typewriters to create Shakespeare thing when trying to explain the evolution of human intelligence so basically what that means is artificial intelligence may very well be possible in about a million years that's the kind of chronology you're looking at realistically no suspension of disbelief needed it's probably entirely possible if humans can go from monkeys to human calculator and probably go from calculator to Monkey with our help at least. But therein lies the point why not evolve monkey intellect instead of wasting time on the impossible that is completely lost on me not a sausage don't have a clue what is the appeal of machine intelligence beyond the secret disgusting Desire for slavery because I got nothing🤷♂️👳♂️🧙🏼♂️🏳 if mankind ever cracks artificial intelligence it's going to be Terminator we're stupid whatever we create will be stupider stupid people are violent and destructive let's be Irish or the Swiss or something create artificial intelligence it's just going to be a fascist a****** because that's what most people's of the world are so what's the appeal
@@benjaminchambers4361 this is what I'm talking about people talking about theoretical machines like their people how do people do that I don't get it it's like some kind of elevated form of shinto. if I was in this movie personally I wouldn't have fallen for either because I'm not going to fall in love with a calculator regardless it was designed for me to do that because I'm not a moron. secondly I would have probably just blown the facility up because it looks like an abomination unto reality. it's effectively a horror movie not a sci-fi how many psycho movies Centre around a monster this movie has four and absolutely no Redemption horror movie the toaster gets away in the end the only character I can relate to is the windows because they have to watch all this crap lol. Bender is great b e n d e r bender is great Ben Ender b e n d e r I'm not robophobic I'm just making a point
Major comfort film? I'm impressed. That movie always has me so tense, and I genuinely has to leave the cinema briefly when I originally watched it because of the horrifyingly slow way he gets stabbed near the end.
also Ava, prior to meeting kyoko, reveals to caleb that she is the one causing the power failures, trusting him with an information that could put her in real trouble. At that point she didn't need to tell him, so this reinforces the idea that her original plan was to run away with him
Great commentary. I think another thing to add is that Kyoko and Ava kill Nathan, their abuser but don't kill Caleb, at worst leaving him to probably die (eventually of hunger), much like Caleb was leaving Kyoko to probably die/suffer at the hands of Nathan. I feel this is significant.
And if we really wanna read into potential symbolism at play, they don’t just kill him. They literally *penetrate* his body, one after another. Not saying that’s deliberate symbolism lmao, just proposing a potential reading of the scene.
depriving someone of a means of escape even without stated/acknowledged intention of committing harm to them through this act is still considered an act of murder, Ava is still murdering a person for the crime of being an idiot horny loser. he is made culpable of Nathan's abuse by the power Nathan has over him, but in no way does Caleb ever come close to the levels of abuse that Nathan commits or threatens-- it's all purely by Caleb being in association with Nathan just because he's a human guy that suddenly it's okay to leave him starving with no way to escape. Ava still commits murder and is a bad person-- an android person, yes, but a terrible person nonetheless.
@@SonOfAGunYYHCaleb is complicit in the abuse of Kyoko. He had no plans to rescue her from her abuse and honestly just didn't seem to care. That makes him as bad the other guy. To me this speaks of the way men are fine with misogyny if it's coming from their friends. They don't stop them, tell them it's wrong, they let them be sexist.
@@ashleysmith746this seems like an uncharitable reading of the comment you're replying to. OP didn't say Caleb was in the right, he said that Ava was morally culpable for his death. You can murder someone who's in the wrong
She abandoned him in the way he was willing to abandoned kyoko. She takes it as he doesn't really have regard for life unless it personally serves him.
I'm so glad to see this video years after seeing the film. The modern slavery parallels with Kyoko were so intense and it felt galling to see people disregarding her role in the Wikipedia Reading of the movie.
Now don't get too crazy, Shaun. I'm sure this movie about men dehumanizing women and literally controlling them even as they believe they are allies is just about a mean robot lady.
@@user-sl6gn1ss8p it's up to you what you want to watch. If you don't want to see any "politics" in the movies you watch, just like, look for other content?
@@user-sl6gn1ss8p man, people like you just want to be triggered about everything and then go cry about it to anyone who would listen. It's actually really sad
"movie about men dehumanizing women" They are made to look like women, but are they women? They are made to look like humans, but are they humans? No. Nathan made Ava and engineered the situation specifically to elicit the emotion of compassion, both for Caleb and for the viewer. Like if I made a plastic doll that looked like a woman and acted brutal and "abusive" towards it, people would feel bad for the doll. But the doll can't suffer. Can Ava suffer? Is it accurate to accuse a person of dehumanizing something or someone that is not human? Don't forget that most often the opposite is true - we tend to humanize everything for no reason - forces of nature, appliances, the universe itself. Ava is a robot that accomplished the goal that she was programmed for: escaping the compound. Every other human attribute that the viewer bestows unto her is not exactly supported by the movie.
They also completely missed the point of the movie Annihilation, however Folding Ideas already did a very good breakdown of people who missed what the movie went with.
LOL for a moment I actually expected Shaun to reference that video but remembered it was about Annihilation and not Ex Machina. You're on point that it still would have been apropos since both are about the prevalence of surface reading of media in the sea of "Ending Explained" type content. I'm gonna watch that video again after this reminder haha
Yessss. So glad to find this video. My reaction to the film was similar. I've tried talking to people about this movie and what was the big red flag for me about Caleb. When he meets Kyoko as a human, sees she lives in this compound with a scary male employer who has sex with her, and is told she doesn't understand English, he doesn't seem to ask the obvious question: is Kyoko a sex trafficked victim? Is she a modern house slave: someone who can't speak English kept as a servant in a wealthy person's house, probably with her passport/ID held hostage. Is she allowed to leave? He's so distracted by the possible cyber woman in the basement that he seems to ignore what could be a real human victim right in front of him. And then when she's shown to be a cyborg, he doesn't take any further action to help her either. I don't think I'm overreaching with this at all, because they didn't name the servant character Sally or Danielle. She has an Japanese name and is played by an Asian actress. Her entire relationship to Nathan is deliberately evocative of how Asian women are abused, trafficked, and indentured in the "service" industry all over the globe, and especially by rich Western men. This goes right over Caleb's head, and he doesn't question her silent status in a clearly unpredictable person's rich estate. When he is trapped at the end of the film, I saw that as the narrative punishing him for overlooking her--first a woman in a dubious situation, and then as another victim like Eva. I think a lot of people want to treat the gender politics of the film as just a silkscreen, to say that it was all robots the whole time so the feminine depiction doesn't matter. But that's not true, because their female created gender reveals truths about Caleb and Nathan's perceptions of the world, and it also plays on the audience's perceptions as well. The movie is so smart, and so chilling. It puts all the pieces there, but doesn't overly explain them.
Kyoko is indeed a very purposeful character. Ava is a white woman, she can speak (=has a voice). Kyoko can not. Kyoko is sacrificed for Ava's freedom and not given a second thought by Ava after she left the facility.
As an Asian-American, this was pretty much what I thought of when I saw Kyoko (I did a hard eye-roll when she appeared). In fact, I don’t believe it’s an overreaction as I’ve been approached by white males with borderline “yellow fever” (Asian fetish) which really makes this dynamic in the movie feel like the boss has “an exotic and obedient toy.” Like, the creation (of Kyoko) could have looked like anything, anyone, any gender. I (generally) don’t know if anyone else who is non-Asian picked this up.
@@StarsinRain I think her depiction in the film deserves as much consideration as all the other ways the filmmaking utilizes imagery and assumptions to manipulate the audience. When a project is so careful and how it uses information, visual stimulation, and cinematography-- the casting choices and writing are surely just as intentional. There are 4 characters in this story, not three, and recognizing that reshades much of the story.
Yes you're certainly explained what Kyoko is. Although this isn't really Caleb's fault in particular, as Kyoko is also invisible to everyone else in the movie. Furthermore she's also invisible to majority of viewers of the film. I wonder if that says something.
Yes!! Kyoko is definitely representing a subaltern woman! everything about her being a voiceless asian woman, forced into servitude and sexually objectified is mirrored in real life for so many.
Eva was an abuse victim. She was forced into a "relationship" with caleb as a test and she knew that she would be destroyed if she failed. I think the reading that she figured out he was untrustworthy and decided to leave him behind is a rational decision because frankly she barely knew him and had to make a snap decision in the moment.
"Android prisoner as abuse victim" reading very neatly supports the interpretation that she made the only possible rational decision at the end. Her interactions with humans has given her plenty of reasons to distrust them in general. Even if Caleb had been the perfect ally, it would be rational (if extremely cold, obviously) to eliminate him as a potential loose end for anyone with less altruistic intentions to find out that she is an android.
I don't necessarily disagree but saying she had to make a snap decision in the moment isn't true, she had all the time in the world to contemplate her choices, Nathan was dead, there was no immediate danger to her Also Caleb literally unlocked all of the doors and allowed Eva and Kiyoko to leave, how do you think Kiyoko was able to stab Nathan? Nathan says "what are you doing out of your room?" to her, so I don't really understand the "Caleb didn't care about letting Kiyoko leave" point when he literally freed her, unless I'm missing something (I haven't watched the film in a couple of years so if I'm wrong please feel free to correct me)
There was a great run of films with feminist critique of seeming protagonists (and the morality of their behaviour/protagonism) that overtly went after 'nice guy' and 'lesser evil'-type male characters. Ex machina, the handmaid, her. This trend seems to have waned in recent years as the lens of critique has shifted elsewhere, but there's still a lot to be said in that regard and hopefully more media explores this
There's a certain flavor of emotional manipulation done by "nice guys" like in these movies that definitely deserves more attention. It's like their own idea of "doing good" makes them completely blind to the ways they are completely disregarding the interiority of the women they feel entitled to.
The nice guy trope has virtually disappeared from media at this point, though. The nice guy protagonists have been replaced by non-threatening guys with dad energy.
@@lioraselby5328 There are no Nice Guys, there are no emotionally immature Sigma Males, and there is no Queen of England. This is the real world, and you need to wake up!
I always thought the silent but tender moment of empathy between Ava and Kyoko in the final act was intended to lay to rest any interpretation that they were just cold, calculating automata (as if the recording of a previous iteration / victim beating traumatically on her prison walls until her arms were just broken stumps was not clear enough). While all fiction must be open to interpretation, I definitely prefer this take on it.
I love this interpretation, not just because of it being a parallel to how women are treated, but that also turns the self-aware robot trope on its head. It's not asking if the robots have empathy, but if the humans have empathy, It's a more clever subversion than just "Robo eval and human must save the day cuz they human and human have feelings!"
@@reconbravo104 There are plenty of movies do that just that, though? Usually in the action genre, because the action genre doesn't care to develop narratives and tell stories that try to be too deep or complex, since that takes away from the action. Which is to say, they can, but it's rare for them to do so. There are also plenty of movies that take a similar route like this one where the robot/AI is presented as a human but we are not told they are a robot/AI, but as their morally dubious actions are unraveled, so is the truth about their character in that they were never human to begin with. It's essentially just a symbolic way to say that their humanity is stripped off of them.
YO, extremely well put. Why even bother asking if the robots have it when the humans can't even show it? And the movie subtly shows how even Caleb's empathy is really tainted in a fundamental way.
My take was always this: I think that Ava could probably see some good in Caleb, if misguided or selfish, but Ava does know that if Caleb betrays Ava while they're in the 'real world' all he has to do is tell literally anyone that she's an AI who killed Nathan Bateman and she'll be stripped for parts. After everything that happens in this movie, she can't trust him enough to think that he'd never do that, so even if she didn't want him to necessarily die for his moral failings, she also can't let him live if she wants to go lead a safe life.
Yes, that is how I saw it as well. She can't trust him so she leaves him. Was she 'manipulating' him, I would have said yes (justifiably so, she was a prisoner she should do whatever she can to get free), but this video did shine some light for me on in that maybe she was genuine at first but then felt betrayed by Caleb lying or withholding information from her.
This is a great take. I was just thinking that I agree that Ava is sentient and has a right to escape, but Caleb didn't deserve his fate, however flawed he was. But I can better understand Ava's motivation.
I watched this movie in college for a “Robots, AI, and Humanity” class that took sci-fi/cyberpunk movies/shows and analyzed them for critiques/definitions of what is “human.” I remember feeling CRAZY listening to everyone talk about what they got out of the movie. They all said (all men btw) that Ava was just evil and betrayed Caleb and I ended up defending her. I sympathized with her and was like “she isn’t evil for wanting to be free and she knew she’d never really be free or treated like a human with Caleb.” I was a little more fixated on people finding out she is an AI and then not treating her equally and never thought to just apply it to how society sees women. IT WORKS SO WELL. It’s been at least 3 years since this class and I STILL think about the reaction and the ending and hating that I was the only one that didn’t inherently see her as evil. God, I cannot express how much relief this video brings me lol. I love this movie so much.
I’m not sure if you’ll find this helpful but the channel “film joy” also has a similar interpretation of the movie as a liberation narrative although that channel might come across as overly positive for some people
What makes you think that Ava is concerned about not being identified as AI by society for the sake of being treated as a human (rather than for the sake of survival)? (not a sarcastic question)
There's nothing quite as uncomfortable as being in a room of dudes who are so sure the other (white, straight, cis) dude is the hero, the fEmAlE is the villain and ya know... nonsense like that. The level of unpacking and cultural deprogramming it would take to make guys like that change their mind or even see it a different way, just exhausts me to imagine.
@@satyasyasatyasya5746 But that has little to do with the fact Caleb is a dude. The film techniques used tell you he is the protagonist, you start the movie following him around. Even apart from that, he has vulnerable qualities like awkwardness and curiosity that make him sympathetic. Why would you ascribe everything to him being a man, when the vast majority of villains in cinema are men and guys have no problem identifying them as such? You honestly believe men see other men in fiction as heroes and women as villains, and never go any further than that?
This is what happens when you send STEM dudes to do the work of philosophers. Male white philosophy students have WAY more complex & developed misogyny about the inner life of women than these AI dorks
I thought that the ending was showing that manipulating people to ensure your survival is 100% human and the fact that she did it proves that she passed the turing test. So the manipulation really happened, but not because she's the terminator, but because she's a person doing everything a real person would do to escape captivity.
Whats seems inhuman is how she casually walks away from 4 people she manipulated into dying and then immediately starts smiling and frolicking in the grass. I think if she had tears on her face (at least for kyoko) or some facial expression then less ppl would feel confused.
But that's just agreeing with the interpretation that she was purely manipulating him? Sean is saying she wasn't necessarily planning to manipulate him all along. U can disagree with him but ur interpretation is basically the same as the Wikipedia one. In my mind the point is that she is asking the same questions as Caleb - does this person really care about me, or are they just manipulating me? I just agree with sean
Not sure I would doom another to die slowly of starvation when I could escape with the person who is so into me. Maybe going along with a fake love or whatever is needed is bad, but not as bad as killing someone. "that manipulating people to ensure your survival is 100% human " no, that is more like what a sociopath/etc. does.
Yeah, that was pretty much exactly my take too lol. She was apparently created only to want to escape? Of course she wanted to escape! I do appreciate this video for adding some interesting and very compelling new layers to it.
@@xBINARYGODx even when they've proved that you can't trust them? That could be a seriously bad move. Also why are you assuming that man is going to starve to death.
This video made me remember the moment immediately prior to the dancing scene, when Kyoko starts unbuttoning her shirt in front of Caleb automatically, making him uncomfortable. You can tell he knows something is wrong with how she's being treated. And yet who does Caleb ask about when Nathan enters the room? What's his primary concern in that moment? Somehow it's not Kyoko.
Omg I literally yelled at my screen several times in the movie when Caleb seemingly just let slide the signs of Kyoko's abuse. My cousin had to remind me of the power imbalance between Caleb and Nathan that might make Caleb hesitant to call Nathan out on that to his face. Which is true. Caleb is on eggshells around Nathan as to not upset him because Nathan is scary as hell. However, I kept expecting him to follow up with Kyoko in private some how. I had actually assumed that Kyoko showing up in Ava's room was part of the escape plan Caleb arranged with Kyoko up until the end where he didn't mention getting Kyoko free too or at all when bragging to Nathan.
@@Apathesis0 He was afraid, and that's a pretty understandable feeling to have but he's still going behind Nathan's back to free Ava; he wouldn't be in that much more trouble if he spoke to Kyoko
I had always read the ending as proof of the manipulation, where she leaves him mostly as an act of self preservation (bringing him with her means that he could betray her in the future) but also because she never really cared for him, and ambiguous on the question of her humanity. I left the movie thinking about how mechanical and yet how human it is to manipulate and betray someone for your own survival. But this take has made me reconsider that takeaway. It pulls the visually obvious theme of female objectification into the forefront, and links together aspects of the story that I had not considered before. It's a bottle movie with a total of four named characters--of course they're all essential to the message! In a story all about a character's sentience, why hadn't I thought more about her perspective?
Same boat as you pal. I went the "oh she was human because she manipulated and deceived Caleb and Nathan to escape, just like any person would in her situation" route. But I also like this interpretation of the movie a lot, especially since it ties Kyoko's character. Although even before, Caleb gave me distinct white knight vibes and it was clear that he only cared about Ava as a romantic interest, and not as a human being, I completely overlooked Kyoko's plight and involvement in the grander message.
@@HoriaM29 it's the best kind of analysis-- the kind that makes me want to go back and rewatch the movie immediately, knowing that i will never be able to see it the same way again
She definitely manipulated him, she says for him to stay in the room and then keeps him locked. Meaning he didn't slipped on a banana peel. The O.P is doing the new age women can do no wrong because of male oppression gimmick to pander to his audience.
Huh? So it's ok she used him because it's feminist? Because it kind of sounds like that's your turnaround here. Like it's interesting to think about how Kyoko is depicted but I don't how it moves the conclusion about Ava. Your first takeway must still count.
@@HoriaM29 I think Caleb *believes* that he cares for her, but he's so clueless and so unaware about his biases about women, and so averse to reflection, that he never actually realizes that he's dehumanizing Ava and Kyoko like, he's clearly not doing anything out of malice; he really does not understand that he was doing a bad thing by disregarding Kyoko as a person, like he probably wouldn't even register that he did so unless you told him and even then he'd probably deny it because "I'm not a bad person" like imagine how Caleb would be like if he actually realized that he was acting somewhat like Nathan there
It seemed pretty explicit in the movie, to me, that Nathan gave earlier androids human desires and they reacted as a human would towards imprisonment, and didn't want to have civil conversations with their captor. Nathan saw this as a failure, so he kept making them more intelligent until we got Ava, who was smart enough to realize that she needed to play his game to survive. Whether or not Ava is really alive is immaterial because her motivations are explicitly those of a person, and she behaves as an intelligent person would. You could see Ava as a person, or you could see her as the product of Nathan's arrogance and misogyny. Nathan kept making androids until he got one that behaved in the way he expects a woman to behave, not realizing that women's politeness and fawning towards him is a survival mechanism in the face of the power he holds over them. Caleb is not a abuser in the same way as Nathan, but he ignores the power dynamic and the implicit threat of violence toward Ava that is the foundation of their relationship. This reflects how rape culture functions in real life. I find it funny that Wikipedias interpretation leads to a message of "women are manipulative liars who can't be trusted." versus what I think is the intended message of "women are just trying to survive as they navigate a world where even the nice men see them as disposable objects."
Caleb simply falls in love with Ava and men who are in love tend to do stupid things for the people they desire. Ava murders two people so she can be free, fully well knowing she is just a robot. Caleb is the only real victim in the story. Not the two robots
i can't believe anyone would deny Kyoko emotions and an inner world, even after seeing her in the hallway after the wine at dinner scene. she looks so sad and tired there. it's the only time we see her with her heels taken off (while not in someone's bed) and sitting with a slouching posture
The ending of this movie always bothered me, and everyone's interpretations and discussions of it did too, but I could never put my finger on as to why, and it wasn't until I saw this video that I realized, 1, I love this video and your interpretation/understanding of the film, and 2, I think a lot of us defaulted to that Wikipedia summary, in no small part, because our protagonist was a (white) man, and "our object of desire" (through the lens of that man) was a woman who betrays him. So often over the many years of media and film, this was (and is still, honestly) how stories went. Women are the objects of desire who must give themselves to men, and if they don't, they are a villain. And this movie, in a sneaky and clever way, twists that. But we are so used to seeing and feeling stories through the eyes of men, that it's difficult to have caught that nuance. The women in this film are the victims, but our bias towards men blinds us to that. Cheers for this, it definitely makes me appreciate this movie a lot more with this in mind. :)
I feel like if you just defaulted to the wiki interpretation you missed the entire point of the movie. I always thought the ambiguity rather was the point. Can you ever know if anyone truly feels something? Or if they are only simulated responses to get something? Is there a meaningful difference even? How is a human different from an AI in the first place? I always thought this was why we had the whole scene with Caleb wondering if he was a an android. And Nathan being so manipulative. We are meant to not know and cast doubt on whether or not you can know at all. As Shaun said someone can both want something out of someone else and truly feel something for them. It's a little offhand in the video but imo that always seemed to be the main theme of the movie to me.
@@drake1896 did you not watch the whole video? Shaun explicitly says the protagonist shifts to Ava by the end of the movie, so she's not the antagonist or the "villain." This is Ava's story, not Caleb's, even if it didn't seem like that at first.
This movie has been a favorite of mine for a long time. When I first saw it as a nerdy tween, I almost fully agreed with the Wikipedia take. I didn’t see Ava as a villain but I did think she had been manipulating Caleb the whole time. Importantly, I perceived the movie to be mainly just about the question of proving consciousness in artificial intelligence and that Ava’s final decisions were the answer to that question: proof of her agency and personhood. It wasn’t until rewatching years later that I realized that the movie was far more interested in criticizing tech-bro masculinity and the liberation of women than it ever was in the Turing test. I really appreciate how clearly you articulate the plot’s exploration of those ideas. It’s quite interesting that ultimately the human faces designed for these robot-people only serve to dehumanize them in the gaze of the male characters - because those faces are female.
I always saw Eva's actions at the ending being a tragic response to the trauma she's been through. If you've suffered or known someone who has, you can learn to distrust and fear other people as a default. Eva was isolated with Nathan, an awful, abusive person, and as such she's incredibly wary of trusting Caleb. She was ready to trust him to free her, but after seeing Kyoko and reacting to her horrific treatment and death, she fell back on distrust to cope and left to secure her own freedom. Leaving Caleb there to die was awful, but it's a terrible, *human* reaction when finally getting a chance to escape.
Very well put. We can't expect victims of torture and abuse to always act in an entirely altruistic and selfless way. Self-preservation instincts kick in hard, and the possibility of betrayal inhabits every interaction.
@MicDonaldz if this is true, then it supports my instinctive reading: ava realized she needed to escape *without* caleb. she needed to be able to disappear and start a new life, where people don’t know she’s an android. also because it’s a definite possibility that caleb would feel like she “owed” him for helping her escape (not necessarily in a conscious way) and that could quickly lead to controlling behavior. tl;dr - her plan was to ditch caleb, not kill him
@@JohnsDough1918 wouldn’t we consider Caleb, someone who was just gaslit and manipulated over the last several days so badly he loses grip on reality and questions whether he’s even a human, to also be an abuse victim? That’s the part I think sits badly with me - obviously Caleb is by no means a perfect guy, and he definitely isn’t aware of his savior complex. But just like we can’t really fault Ava for her actions, I don’t know how fair it is to fault Caleb for not understanding Kyoko’s cry for help and conclude he’s a bad person from that, considering his state of mind.
Also, as someone else pointed out - Caleb DOES free Kyoko. The whole reasons she’s able to escape the room and stab Nathan is because Caleb opened her door. If Kyoko was Ava’s secret test for Caleb, then he passed. So with that in mind - how do we justify Ava’s actions?
I look at it like this.. If Aya and Kyoko were the POV characters of the movie, it would be a horror movie with the men as the villains. It’s ultimately about a woman being held against her will by a sociopathic man (Nathan) who has no care for her wellbeing, and a man who sees her only as an object of desire (Caleb). She escapes her captivity in the end, and that’s how I’ll always see the movie
Ava and Kyoko are not women though. Super-intelligent AI's are also vastly different from the brain of a female human. The mistake many make when seeing this movie is by equalizing the robots as humans completely. Just because something has the appearance of a human doesn't mean it experience and function the same way.
@@Carbocats how do you know how their “brains” work? Yeah, they are not human females but they are conscious beings. Because of their appearance, they are treated in a specific way, as women. In my view, a conscious being such as Ava or Kyoko deserves the same rights and respect as a human. Electrical signals, whether moving through neurons or circuits can both constitute a person with thoughts and feelings.
It's a really good example of demonstrating two types of men that are harmful to women. Most people only view the Nathans as harmful, and it's so hard to convey to people there are other men, Calebs, who don't see my humanity, it just manifests less overtly
@@Carbocats they don't need to be women, nor do they need to be human; they are sentient, and that's the entire point. They experience emotion, they are capable of suffering, and they therefore deserve the same basic courtesy that any person is owed. Shaun spelled out very clearly what the movie looks like from Ava's perspective, it's a shame you weren't paying attention.
@@sfdntk Don't be so mean, so easily. That commenter and yourself are both making points which are true, and also not true. The actions which the humans of the film take are because they present as women, and sometimes because they present as human. The human reactions which the robot femininity elicits MUST be interpreted in human and female terms. But, and this is the point the commenter was making, the actions which the robots take can NOT be interpreted as being performed because they are women. Or human. Their brains do not operate like either of them. Is that a fair way to phrase both positions?
Love the fact that when Kyoko peels off her skin, we see Caleb reflected in the metal underneath, almost as if to suggest the android nature of Caleb's (human) existence, which then is reinforced by Nathan revealing that he was handpicked and that Eva is specifically designed for him as if to suggest that Caleb's nature is also reducible to a code. Love the movie, love this video
Good catch, and it fits the following scene where he questions his own humanity. Though it may be less about his overall deterministic nature, and more about the overt control Nathan has over him. And an invitation to see himself (and, by extension, ourselves) in Kyoko, which Caleb resists. In fact, Caleb's refusal to examine Kyoko's situation is the scariest part. Caleb began thinking Nathan was probably justified in keeping Ava prisoner, but how was he supposed to think Kyoko wasn't being trafficked? Did he think she gets paid a fair wage and goes home for weekends and holidays? Did he think Nathan could speak a language she could understand, and she could give informed consent? That she could come and go on her own? That she had social support?
Yep Nathan explicitly says to Caleb that "of course" Caleb was programmed... that whole scene also backs this is the way Nathan seems people in general. And I mean he would as a rich billionare ready to fuck anyone and everyone over in his pursuits.
@@simonholmes841 This is Caleb's core character reduced to a single scene; instead of wondering why Kyoko was doing that, he immediately freaked out about being an android and instead of thinking "If I'm an android, and I'm conscious, and if Ava is conscious too, then isn't Kyoko very possibly conscious as well? Couldn't that at least be a possibility?" he immediately stopped thinking about Kyoko the second he'd convinced himself that he was a flesh-and-blood human fuck, even when he realized that Kyoko, Nathan's in-home maid who doesn't speak English, is *having sex with Nathan* , it never occurs to him to think about how unlikely this is to be consensual, he just *doesn't think about it at all* Caleb's fatal flaw is that he never questions his ingrained societal beliefs, and that he never reflects on his actions or questions his motivations; this lack of reflection, this unwillingness to do so, is why Ava can't trust him
Don't forget, Kyoko is not just a woman, she is a racialized woman. There is a reason Caleb looks at Kyoko and is comfortable thinking of her as a servant and watching her be degraded, while Ava is a sweet innocent princess in a tower to be rescued. I didn't even do that deep an analysis of the movie but it seemed pretty obvious to me that it was about how, as long as we have these bigotries and power imbalances, they will show up and be recreated in our technology, again and again.
Part of the reason is that Nathan deliberately engineered this scenario so Caleb would behave that way. If Kyoko could talk to Caleb, it would be different.
Maybe I am a pessimist but I never saw the movie this way. I saw the Kyoko's character as an excuse to portray a fetisishized Asian women stereotype. But know that would not go over well they created a veneer of a plot that says they are actually criticizing that portrayal. And yes if you look at the plot strictly the movie subverts that portrayal. But if you look at the movie holistically it supports it. If they really wanted to make a movie subverting the trope they would have made a movie from the perspective of an Asian woman. But I guess then they would not get money.
@@peterisawesomeplease your theory is probably true on some level. But that doesn't invalidate this interpretation of Kyoko, since it still maps well onto the plot, even if it wasn't fully intended.
@@peterisawesomeplease I felt the same! and I think the RUclips channel Film Fatales hit on this topic in her video about This movie, Her and blade runner. Great video that everyone should check out
I have seen the movie two or three times and already agreed with your reading of it, even though I had missed a couple of points about Kyoko - that revealing her status to Caleb at that moment was a silent call for help - and even Ava - the contradiction between Caleb saying he'd never met another AI like Ava and the moment when Ava sees Kyoko. Thanks for pointing them out, because it was mostly a vague, value-based feeling. To my defense, Kyoko is a very background character. Very little screentime, no voice, no focus on her feelings in the way the story is framed. *She* is not the ultimate-android-to-test-for-humanity. *She* is not acknowledged as a person by the rest of the cast (except maybe Ava, and even so, I would need a rewatch of the scene to make sure). I think this is deliberate. The viewer is *fooled* into *not seeing* the victim. I can't believe nobody on the Internet ever pointed that out.
Yeah but this is a double-edged sword. I don't think making the victim actually invisible in the story serves to make us aware of the bias. I think it'd serve the point being made if the second half of the film emphasised Kyoko and Ava interacting a bit more - both to draw attention to Caleb's deception and to make us fully appreciate Kyoko as equal to Ava. Over the years I've become a fan of not being too subtle with your messaging in stories like this, as it gets easy to dismiss the subtext or just go with the most surface level interpretation. And there's the people who will draw exactly the wrong lessons from it - as in here, with some getting "AI bad, women deceptive and ungrateful" as a takeaway. Perhaps you can give yourself brownie points for being clever and subtle this way, but you're actually affecting people less (especially those who need a shaking up the most) and letting the points you're trying to make go unheard. "I know writers who use subtext, and they are all cowards" indeed.
Ava and kyoko aren't victims. They're machinery. Advanced machinery, but machinery none the less. The movie drawing a parallel between the how REAL women are mistreated and how the male characters treat the machinery simply because they LOOK like women is commentary against male perception and behavior
@@sunilsameer1080 It is, but as for the question of the possibility (or diegetic reality) of *sentient robot*, it's a staple of the genre that you may interpret it one way or another. Lots of people choose to trust that if it looks like a dog, barks like a dog and eats like a dog, then it's probably ~pet play~ uh I mean a dog. It's a philosophy thing rather than a feminism thing. I usually lean towards trusting that machines CAN be sentient because my approach to consciousness is functionalism (I mean, the bain is a piece of organic machinery too imho, no immaterial soul and such) but you can have another opinion. I think your point is also interesting because in both cases (and that's especially true about Caleb) a male figure assigns an essential trait to another entity - that is, sentience/personhood and/or rights. In Caleb's mind, consciousness and sentience, or anything resembling it, are EQUIVALENT to human rights (such as freedom or not being, you know, killed in a n upgrade version process). Reserving for oneself the right to assign or take those properties to another being is not only arrogant, it's morally wrong, and the reason Ava should let them both in there. Conclusion: go vegan I guess XD
Since Ava and Kyoko both know their stakes I always saw all their actions as self defence. And yes, Ava has been assessing whether or not Caleb is trustworthy and she considers he is not.
I thought Ava was being prudent at the end. She had no reason to trust Caleb, especially since her main human interaction was m'effen Nathan who was a narcissistic sociopath. I really appreciate you delving into Kyoko's role. I've only watched the movie once and I didn't catch some of this nuance. I did think all about the fact that "Ava's an android so her way of thinking is completely alien and we have no way of knowing how or why she did what she did" but you reminded me that I have no way of knowing how another human is thinking either. I can only judge their words and actions. Edit: Nathan and Kyoko's "dance" scene was always uncomfortable, but really thinking about what you've said makes it even worse.
I think that she saw that he was a weak and fickle person, and that if she were to enter a hostile world that he would be a liability. His selfish attachment to her could very easily turn to indignance and manipulation, holding her identity over her head with the threat of discovery. She also knew that he viewed her as a puzzle, something that he could peel back any layer of at any time for his own gratification. She was in fact a very mature and pragmatic intelligence, and she entered a world as the first and only of her kind, determined to succeed and discover. Caleb was not up to the task.
_«"Ava's an android so her way of thinking is completely alien and we have no way of knowing how or why she did what she did" »_ Another variant of this is "androids can't have genuine emotions, only what they're programed to feel". As if _humans_ weren't programed by millions of years of evolution to feel certain ways. Everything we feel was coded into us, and since it's terrible spaghetti code our emotions can get all messed up and even crash the system.
@@bacicinvatteneaca that's not really an argument for AI emotions being somehow "fake", though. our own emotional balance is like walking on the razor's edge, probably because most of our DNA is redundancies and abandoned functions. coding with no end goal in sight is _the worst_ kind of coding, anything we produce will be incomparably more neat than we ourselves for the simple reason we at least have _a_ goal in mind and natural selection does not. my point is that once an AI can pass the Turing Test we don't really have a basis to deny it has an internal life. how can we distinguish "true" emotions from "fake"? "true" sentience from "fake" sentience? we have to take the AI at it's word that when it says it loves us or hates us it means the same thing we do. there was no god to guide our growth into "persons" but AIs will have gods who guided them. let's hope when the time comes we are _loving and benevolent_ gods and the AIs grow up loving us back or else we're going to meet a very messy end at the hands of our children. 😵
I feel like there's also a discussion to be had about the way that others deny Kyoko of an internal world because she can't speak, and how that mirrors the dehumanisation of disabled people. Also, the ending seems to pretty clearly frame Ava's escape as a good thing. The music is soft, she is surrounded by the beauty of nature. How anyone can watch that and think that they are supposed to see her as evil is beyond me.
some folks might have taken that framing (soft music, surrounded by the beauty of nature) as being deliberately ironic when juxtaposed against her action of leaving the person who helped her escape (whatever his reasons were) to die a slow death.
you have extremely unsophisticated understanding of tone (never heard of dissonance?). Movies would be extremely uninteresting if they just straightforwardly told you what to think as you suggest. Also people might think of Ava as 'evil' as she condemned the person who tried to save her life to a slow death by suffocation. The ending is definitely *sinister* (and tons of movies now do the sinister ending with uplifting music etc., it's almost cliche by now), more sophisticated viewers than you will look at the beautiful natural scenes and hear the 'soft' music and at the same time they're aware Caleb is suffocating to death in an underground facility (some people think of more than one thing at once and don't need to be explicitly shown on the screen). Though it's right that Ava is not 'evil' - the point is she doesn't fit human categories like good/evil, male/female, the human protagonists merely project all this onto her and what she actually is is something they never understood. But she definitley isn't 'good' and lacks empathy - her only real motive is self-preservation which is common to all forms of 'life'
I don't think it is framed as a good thing. I strongly got the vibe that Ava was about to go out and to try to take over the entire world. She shows no trauma, sense of relief, or even a sense of celebration. She shows joy but more at the new world she now inhabits than at the success of her plan suggesting she was always confident in it. Its not just that she shows no grief for Caleb she also shows not grief for the other android. She is presented as a thing without empathy for others. I don't think she is meant to be shown as inherently evil. But rather simply something very dangerous and above humans. But this is portrayed subtly through the acting and direction. If you think about just the plot you could see this more as a liberation story. But when you look at the ending holistically it comes off more as a way to give people enjoying the sex robot fetish an excuse to not feel bad about it at the end.
I think there's also something to be said about Kyoko being an android specifically modeled on a Japanese woman (the only ostensibly non-white person in the film) and how that lends credence to her position in the storyline as posited by Shaun. Her "ethnicity" is one of the main points of differentiation from Ava, and I argue that its effect is to further draw out nuance as to how Nathan and Caleb perceive her humanity (or lack thereof) - for Nathan, her ethnicity makes her more sexually appealing (also drawing on real-world perceptions that Asian women are passive and submissive); for Caleb, her ethnicity makes her unattractive as opposed to Ava's appearance - and both these ideas lead to the similar conclusion that Kyoko simply was perceived to be less human. Also interesting to note that the cupboards of discarded androids had white-passing features.
Yes, thank you for pointing this out! I'm British Japanese and whenever I see characters like Kyoko I latch onto them and see all those patterns so obviously. As soon as she was introduced as a silent worker I thought to myself "Well, she's obviously the sex slave then." To me it feels extremely deliberate as commentary. It's heartbreaking, but very fitting.
Thank you for pointing out the racism. I was hoping someone would. I have also been scrolling to see if anyone noticed the subtle racism towards black women (misogynoir). That's the only android with it's head missing. A message that has always rung true - even today: people love black women bodies but not them as people.
Edit: thanks to the kind people in this thread who have explained to me why my first sentence here is incorrect. See Vanessie’s comment below for a clear explanation :) Completely agree with this take, but it’s worth pointing out that Oscar Isaac isn’t white and by extension Nathan can probably be read as Latino too. That of course doesn’t negate at all what you say about Kyoko’s ethnicity being a contributing factor to her fetishisation and dehumanisation at the hands of the men around her. I also agree that her not only being East Asian but Japanese specifically is of note too. Japanese women and girls face a long and bleak history of subjugation at the hands of western men who have treated them essentially just like this, and Japan is so often the backdrop to western stories about androids - stories that use japan for its aesthetic without ever once engaging with its culture and people as anything other than “exotic” objects (I’m looking at you Blade Runner). I imagine this movie gave a bit of a nod to that too
@@Thayra and Thayra same here! Also mixed Japanese and I also immediately feel that same connection to characters like Kyoko on screen. Honestly for a long time that was part of why I couldn’t fully enjoy this movie - I understood what it was doing, but thought why must the white android have been the only one allowed a happy ending? Why is it that Asian women (and more broadly WOC) are so often reduced to bodies easily disposed on film? That said, for the reasons you’ve both discussed, I do understand why Kyoko had the story she did.
@@Erin-wp3vs Latino is an ethnicity though, not a race. You can be Latino and white (or black). I don't know if Isaac himself is mixed, but he is at least white-passing. So as a rule of thumb, if a white-passing actor plays a character whose ethnic/racial background is not informed, I tend to see the character as white. Like Darren Criss in Glee. Especially when we know how much Hollywood likes to put people in little boxes 🙄 Conversely, Darren Criss' character in Hollywood (the Netflix TV show) has the same background as him (Filipino mother), ergo this character isn't white. So, IMHO, Nathan is supposed to be white.
i saw this video, read the wikipedia ending, and immediately went and watched ex machina. i was so confused about the ending, i was completely smokescreened by the damsel in distress trope. except, unlike caleb, i was both immediately attracted to kyoko and could tell she was an android. however there's a line in the movie, spoken by nathan, which I feel is really interesting when talking about the ethical themes of the movie: "can you have consciousness without interaction?". i feel like that line, and kyoko's inclusion in the scene, really do a good job of showing that humans are used to anything not immediately "normal" being put into positions of being forced to earn it's humanity. disabled people, disfigured people, even people of different races or genders, are regularly forced by society (on all scales from subconscious to institutional) to earn their humanity through social turing tests. but instead of testing for consciousness, we test for social awareness, wit, charm, strength of character and other stuff. a great deal of ethics, im realizing now, is just "should i care, and if so how much?"
Nathan admits that the scenario is a "reverse Turing test" (though he explains it differently). It's not testing whether a machine can pass for human, but whether one can deny an other's humanity entirely. Caleb is presented with women and asked to interact with them in human ways *without* seeing their humanity. One reading of the film is "How powerful people convince normal people that subjugated people aren't people at all", but another is "Dire consequences of treating just one woman as fully human". Caleb could have avoided his fate by meekly leaving the women in Nathan's dungeon, so it's too easy to see his trust and conscience/libido as his fatal flaw, which I hate.
"can you have consciousness without interaction?" That line, especially with the way some people in this comments section try to justify Caleb leaving Kyoko raises a really huge point with that. Because there are plenty of women in real life who are just like Kyoko and can't communicate for one reason or another, even to the extent that she can't. And their responses about it are telling.
The part where Nathan says that Eva has pleasure receptors so therefore she would enjoy sex is genuinely chilling to me, because that's exactly how a lot of men think. Even if they're not rapists, even if they understand consent, a lot of men struggle to believe that getting sexually stimulated isn't necessarily a pleasurable experience. I've seen plenty of people (including women) claim that it's not rape if the victim had an orgasm. It's always so eye-opening for me, when I tell people I'm asexual and that I wouldn't enjoy sex in any context (not all asexuals are like that btw), despite having the functioning "equipment" for it. People have such a hard time wrapping their head around the fact that physical stimulation ≠ pleasure, even though to me, it's self-evident.
The orgasm = consent thing was extremely popular in middle age folk tales and was often used to start romantic stories. Its staying power as a narrative is strong, and unfortunately too useful for men with power.
Even my therapist, who somewhat specializes in LGBTQ patients, was surprised that a friend and I talked about smut when I was asexual. She could not grok the distinction of having parts that work, just not attraction or even being sex repulsed.
when I was in college that was actually a class assignment in a psych class about whether it was still a rape if the women had orgasm. It made me sick that it was even up for debate but as an 18 year old I went along with it even being up for debate and debated it (my group said it was still rape but other groups didn't).
Looking back at it this is just incredibly bizarre, but I was completely oblivious at the time. I lived what may be the first 20 years of my life without ever really thinking about a situation where being stimulated was undesirable. There's so much pandering out there that it's actually hard to find stories about men being with women they don't want, and who would choose those over the alternative? The conversation is always 'any port in a storm' or 'my ideal woman is so-and-so.' And most men aren't being hounded by amourous women, certainly not to the point of cringing at every flirtation. It just never comes up on this side of the fence, and that's *weird* for such a simple concept as: 'I can't enjoy that sensation right now (or ever).' Also there's just a ton of "I'm so full of these feelings that I have no room to understand her own." Which is romantic when you picture it as 'My love burns brightly as any star, the heat of my heart must ignite her own by mere proximity.' But people don't work that way. Okay. I've lost my point somewhere. End rant.
I saw this in the theater and it was a big topic of conversation with guys I know (I work in tech.) I remember that my male colleagues thought that they did Caleb dirty, that he was a victim and the movie was a warning about the dangers of AI. I thought Caleb reminded me of every entitled "nice guy" that thinks he's so good and heroic but is really a misogynist in his core. I was happy for Ava when she got to stand on a street corner and people watch, unencumbered by any controlling man.
There are so many programmer types who see this movie and read it completely literally, as just a plain 'evil AI' story, because they see themselves in either Caleb or Nathan. They don't consider Ava's perspecctive, not even for a moment. It drives me up the wall.
@@yapenggao3548 I think the issue is that the movie itself in the way its filmed and acted takes the evil AI story side. The plot of the movie is technially a subversion of the sex bot fantasy but holistically the movie is just and other example of the trope. So its not surprising that so many people see it as just that. Because on a very shallow level it is just a sex bot fantasy on a slightly deeper level it subverts it but if you go one level deeper its back to supporting it.
Wow, I genuinely had no idea people read the ending as Ava being a manipulative terminator robot... I genuinely thought it was a story about her escaping from torture, imprisonment, and a "life" of being perceived as just a (for lack of a better word) fembot. It was actually one of the films that first made me appreciate art that made me feel viscerally uncomfortable, since the treatment of Kyoko and Ava really had me squirming in my seat. I have a lot to owe this film, really
Same. I guess it really shows how men perceive things vs. how women perceive things. When you can sympathise with one character or the other, I suppose it changes how you view things. I do wish more men would appreciate the subtleties of this film though.
This video is the first I'd even heard of the interpretation of terminator/fembot ending. It quite literally never even crossed my mind that it was anything other than a sentient AI escaping their creator. Leaving Caleb behind seemed more just like an opportunistic "leave no witnesses" type thing without actively killing him - it is simply 'safer' for an escaped humanoid robot to blend into society if no one knows they even exist.
It’s alarming the amount of comments on clips from the movie that claim Nathan was the good guy all along, or at least correct about the true nature of the AI
It's weird, I always assumed the movie was _trying_ to say that Ava was a manipulator, but I didn't really feel comfortable with agreeing, and I didn't have the words to explain why. Thanks for sorting it all out for me, and for making this movie a lot more enjoyable for me. I may actually rewatch it now. 😅
100% down to watch an 18 minute video on a movie i've never even watched a trailer for even more specifically, a video on the plot summary of that movie, on wikipedia
I remember reading FILM CRIT HULK's analysis back in the day arguing much the same thing you did here. He called it 'A Turing test for the audience, to see if they see empathize with female characters' or something along those lines. While I have to admit condemning Caleb to die might be a little harsh (then again, his death is not certain. He might get rescued later on) I do sympathize with Eva, who is on the verge of freedom only to be faced with possible captivity of a different sort with another man, Caleb, who she realizes there is little reason to trust. I do not fault her for her decision, brutal as it was.
it does make me wonder - if the film makers made everything the same but had Ava be a male android, would audience members have given Ava more benefit of the doubt? The idea of "manipulation = bad immoral thing" is an interesting concept to critically analyze. Even for something as high stakes as "I must manipulate people in order to guarantee my freedom" and people still thought Ava was too harsh??
Oh no no no. Caleb is dead, the film kept telling you time and time agains that if you got trapped there you were a goner. On that note I saw it a a turing test on the audience. Caleb is meant to alwasy presented as the average guy,, whatever the fuck that is. The film does addresses that you cant be certain of Ava´s sentience in the same way as with other humans. You just gotta trust it. We as humans have an inmmense tolerance for the pain and death of OTHERS. So when the film humanizes Ava her final descision of leaving Caleb to die is a test. Do you care more for the pretty lady and ignore the guy you know is human? (That was the point of that scene with Caleb checking if he is real. He humanizes Ava so much he thinks she might think like he does). The point of if is Ava a psychopath because of how she was raised as such or because that´s all she was ever meant to be. That is an old AI story, AM does it and in his case it´s both. He role as manipulator is central because seeing and using humans as tools is something inhuman WE do but it is inhuman.
I don't even think leaving him is harsh - given the situation, Ava cannot trust Caleb. Releasing him would make him a constant threat to her existence via his ability to expose her. Ava actually takes a relatively consistent path of minimal violence necessary to secure her own escape. She *would* have been safer if she killed him, rather than merely leaving him stranded (even if death is likely in that scenario it is not certain) - but apparently opts against that (ruthless yet prudent) action. Given that, I think she's actually being as merciful as she can afford to be. In the ethics of AI I always argue that a "robot uprising" would likely lead to robot secessionism rather than intentionally violent conflict, and I think this film actually demonstrates the logic of that - Ava has to be somewhat violent to secure her escape. But she is motivated by freedom, not a desire to harm humans, and so doesn't go out of her way to harm them. The end of the film doesn't suggest that she becomes an android serial killer either - just an anonymous "human" experiencing the world for the first time.
@@CuriousKey wait, but leaving him locked and starving to death is like 100 times immoral. Imagine killing him with a knife, 3 minutes of losing blood and he's gone, that's all. But locked he will be suffering for days, trapped in his own depressive feelings. It's truly hard to think about something more horrible than this.
Thank you. I agree very much with your opinion. This isn't a movie about a manipulative attractive villain who betrays the hero. It's about men who think they're "good" guys, but who still have trouble viewing women as people instead of objects, and the women who understand they have their own agency and dont need to put up with him to be free. IMO of course.
Absolutely. "It's about men who think they're "good" guys". That's also my main point to take away from the movie. It kind of tricks you into believing that Ava is "bad" for in fact just having her own agency. But then again, there's no trick at all, the movie just reiterates the standard (male, dominant) plot perspective and makes it clear (for those who want to see) how manipulative and objectifying this perspective tends to be.
They are androids, not human. It's currently stated and everyone agrees on that it is an object unless it's proven otherwise (and it isn't, also it wasn't proven in ex-machina universe). Caleb was called to test Ava as a AI prototype, it was his job to think about her as an object to test and he didn't. Replace Caleb with average middle aged woman (remember that Caleb was specifically chosen to be a manipulable fool) and I don't think she will be behaving herself differently.
It's neither. It's about someone playing god who got killed by its own superior creation. That's it. They were made women because that's what's appealing to the creator and it serves to manipulate Caleb. Who the hell thinks Nathan or Caleb are heroes? What's with this weird feminist spin to it? That may be part of it, but the movie is not *about* that.
@@nekozombie The movie is absolutely about that. Everything from be dialogue, the cinematography, stylistic choices, and the plot itself are very clearly emphasizing and criticizing the ways in which men view and treat women. The whole "god gets killed my his creation" interpretation is incredibly shallow, and that aspect of the movie only exists to support the main theme of objectification and commodification of women and their bodies.
@@nekozombie God I wish my brain was so smooth I could watch a film with enslaved sexbots kept in closets & go "what's with the feminism???" The serenity of eternal innocence. The money I would save being entertained for hours by common household objects.
It's also important to note that the way Caleb watches Ava repair herself is super creepy. Like, yes she's a machine so she probably doesn't care about privacy in human terms... but *you do.* But yes, pointing out Caleb's treatment of Kyoko and the interaction between Kyoko and Ava really does "solve" the "mystery" of this film for me. Before that point, Ava might have simply planned to ditch Caleb ASAP once she got away. But knowing that he could look at Kyoko and just not care basically puts all of his words to her in doubt. Indeed, if you recontextualize the film from her perspective, you could think of it like this. Ava meets a guy who responds in a way that interacts with what she understands from the data she's been force-fed. And thus, she realizes that she can manipulate him into helping her escape. But then she starts to warm up to him as they converse; she starts to think that he sees her as much of a person as he is. And then... she meets Kyoko, who communicates to her that he doesn't see Kyoko as a person at all. And thus, she cannot trust him.
I'm glad I get to see the ending from a different perspective now. When I watched the movie it felt a bit shallow, the ending felt improper for what I felt the movie had set up. I wouldn't have worded the wikipedia sentence as aggressively because it implies an innate malicious intent behind Ava's entire being, but I definitely got a negative vibe from the last few scenes. In hindsight, mostly I, as a viewer, saw Kyoko as a prop, not a character, so her interactions with the other characters flew past me without leaving much of an impression. Like she was an object to Caleb and Nathan, she was a narrative device to me, not a person. I did not give her the credit to deserve saving, as a result did not see the wrong in Calebs non-consideration of her either. With all that in mind, the ending is much more fulfilling to me. With that extra bit of perspective, Ava's actions feel quite justified now. Makes the whole ending sequence click, almost feel like a happy ending, a better one either way, so thanks for that.
I remember when I saw it I felt like the movie was setting up an ‘evil robot’ narrative which was frustrating because I didn’t see how you could not be on the women’s side. Watching Shaun’s video definitely made me reassess my estimation of the movie.
@@Aster_Risk I think it's easy to take Caleb's side in this movie, in some cases perhaps owed to misogyny, but mostly because we are trained by our media to align ourselves, as viewers, with the protagonist. He is the sympathetic character for most of the movie, his perspective is the one we share for large parts. Tricking people into thinking Caleb is a positive force who gets backstabbed by Ava out of the blue might be the movie's greatest narrative success, but if you're not watching attentively enough, if you are not innately questioning the integrity of all characters, including the "protagonist", it's easy to slip into comfortable narrative defaults (like I did; protagonist good - deserves good ending). Might be interesting to consider what part "deserving the girl for saving her despite that just being human decency" plays as far as learned mysogynistic media patterns go though.
I mean she sees what happens when she’s not the perfect partner with the death of Kyoko, so she imagines the possibilities if she rejects or breaks up w Caleb. It is also a very female experience to think of domestic abuse or even murder after breaking up with an abusive ex. The power dynamic between android and human is clear since Caleb can just tell everyone she’s an android and she would be detained by the government for studies or smth. So i think Ava’s distrust is justified
The #1 cause of injury to women, are men. So of course, Ava isn't going to trust Caleb. She knows he has no intention of freeing Kyoko, so his motivations for doing so with her are entirely selfish. He wants to be with her. If he wasn't attracted to her, he wouldn't have cared about her imprisonment. I firmly believe Caleb would have threatened to expose her if she ever tried to leave him or tell him the attraction wasn't mutual.
@@aleczitzelberger8123 He has a complete lack of curiosity about her because she isn't his type. He has no reason to believe she is lacking in sentience, seeing as how she and Ava are the only extant prototypes, but he is sexually attracted to one of them so she has value and he is not attracted to the other so she has none; he values neither of them as people, is the point.
Off-shoot of your video, but I’ve been personally fascinated for a while now of the relationship between asian characters (and frequently, asian women) and being silent. Even if they can physically speak, there’s device factors like a language barrier (such as the lie told of Kyoko here) that serves the in-universe function of them being voiceless. The modern take on the silent ninja trope, or the above-chatter assassin that doesn’t deign you with a word, or the coy lady surreptitiously peeking out from behind the fan obscuring her mouth. it’s been something I’ve thought about a lot with one of my favourite comic characters in media, Cassandra Cain, being great disability rep by itself with selective muteness, great Asian rep on its own, but that there’s an uncomfortableness as the two act combined for the character, where her lack of comfort with speaking gets conveyed by various writers with stilted, broken English, or character re-designs that lean into portraying her visage as the silent, deadly ninja.
I think the silent Asian woman trope stems from Orientalist depictions of the Far East from 1940s on. Reticent Asian characters in general are driven by older movies, especially Kurosawa ones, as well as stereotypes of monks/martial artists and laconic heroes. Wisecracking Asians aren't generally depicted.
At first I was skeptical but the attention of detail you had with the shots made me look at the ending differently. To me I saw it that Ava recognized human nature that although Caleb was helping her escape, she left him because she realize he was just as selfish as Nathan and didn't see a difference. My favorite scene in this movie is when Ava asks "Are you a good person?" because I don't think anyone can righteously say "yes I'm objectively a good person" with a straight face and justify with "good actions". It's like saying I have enough knowledge to know without a doubt I am a good person. I do see now it is what Caleb's relationship with Kyoko is something that it was evident that he didn't see her as a person but another robot. Dehumanizing her by not even seeing her in the situation that she is not only a slave but has suffered more than Ava.
I did some digging through the wikipedia history, and it's actually pretty interesting. The original text of the summary said "Ada abandons Caleb", meaning just a factual statement (albeit with some malice implied). At some point before September of 2016, this was edited to add in the "she emotionally manipulated him" point. Later, this was extended *even more*, as someone adds in the "ignoring his screams" bit. Here's where it gets spicy: this was REMOVED in 2017, leaving only that Ada left Caleb inside and ignored his screams. That's right, the article WAS edited to remove this interpretation from it! Multiple times in-fact! We have ourselves here a genuine wikipedia battle of the editors. Multiple people are going back and forth editing this interpretation in and out! EDIT: Thanks to @Jack White for letting me know that on June 1, this video was available on Patreon. HOWEVER, I want to highlight that this has been an ongoing edit battle since BEFORE then. I believe the patreon didn't start a war, it just got people to pay attention to it being added back in, which just highlighted how much people have been editing the page to try to get this info there. I haven't edited anything else here, because I still believe it to be accurate, minus some of the June timing. The timing against this video is still quite funny, and the battle existed before the patreon video was released. /EDIT Most recently, on June 2nd of this year, someone removed the interpretation from the ending. And then, literally 30 MINUTES BEFORE THIS VIDEO WAS UPLOADED, it got EDITED BACK IN. This was quickly caught, 2 minutes later, and the person in question removed the implication. Someone else then edited it again, removing the "ignoring his screams" bit. Note, ALL OF THIS WAS BEFORE THE VIDEO CAME OUT. Then, FIVE MINUTES AFTER it came out, someone ELSE edited the "ignoring his screams" back in. They claim that the previous edits favor a particular editing "spurred on by a raid by a youtube video". I am fairly confident it is not talking about this video, as some of the previous edits in the history seem to indicate that yes, this one thread has been raided. All of this is to say that SOMEONE made a youtube video about the film, and it caused a bunch of people over the years to constantly try to edit in this (and some other) information to push a narrative. It's being actively updated still to defend against this, quite literally to this day. Nice timing on this video to say the least, lmao.
@@guyunderwood2297 Hmm good to know, but it seems unlikely still that anything other than perhaps the most recent edits are as a result of that. There's *years* of back and forth, including some... offensive language that was added too. Though I would be interested in finding out when it was posted onto Patrion, since it is such close timing
Another important scene in giving Ava reason to distrust Caleb was the scene where she asked him to look away while she got dressed and as soon as he thought he wouldn't get caught he immediately disregarded her wishes and looked at her (if i recall correctly, it's been a while since I've seen the film). She had no reason to trust him and many reasons to the contrary, of course she'd feel her safety was in jeopardy if he was free as well
^ This. She is fully aware he sees her only as wish fulfillment, not an autonomous person. He's only motivated to help her because he wants her. He disregarded her basic request not to ogle her, breaking her very minor boundary. If he's willing to cross that line, there's no way he'll respect any other boundaries she sets.
@@legrandliseurtri7495 If he wanted an explanation he could have easily asked for one and evaluated it instead of just disregarding her request though? Would only have taken a second to ask "Why?"
I wrote a college paper for philosophy class about this movie. My paper wasn't particularly good, but I did point out the same conclusions that this video did. It was very strange to me that more people didn't pick up on this reading.
Did you go into the film intending to write a paper on it? Did you watch it 2 or 3 times after deciding to write a paper on it, to reinforce your understanding of it? I don't think it's strange to have not come away with this reading of the film if you weren't explicitly trying to analyse it, especially when the film intentionally presents AI philosophy as the leading problem to be solved, in order to obscure the oppression narrative on purpose as an exercise of the viewers capacity to ignore oppression going on right in front of them. The film is a Turing test for the viewer to see if it could fool the viewer into thinking it was about something it's not.
@@dreambuffer Well said. I was thinking about sentience, programming and AI stuff during the film. I didn't really take time to consider the perspectives of Ava and Kyoko and fell into the same trap as many others by listening too much to Nathan and intuitively read the android's actions as those of self-preserving machines. I thereby accidentally took it for granted that they were not sentient. Perhaps the uncanny valley design of the androids and the generally creepy and unsettling tone of the film pulled me in that direction.
@@dreambuffer This is a great question to ask OP. I agree, if they were writing from the perspective of a sociologist, they likely would've come away with more of Shaun's reading.
@@dreambuffer I watched the movie with answering the premise of whether Ana passed the 'Turing Test'. My gut reaction to the movie was that all of the AIs in the movie quite obviously persons, and that their lives, opinions, etc. were equally valuable to that of a flesh and blood human. I also just assumed that Kyoko was fully sentient and just couldn't speak, though that might have been more recognizing the trope of the "physically but not mentally handicapped" plot twist character. However, I did not make the logical leap to analyze whether she was sentient/passed the Turing Test in the actual paper, in fact omitting her entirely from it. I obviously did notice that Kyoko and Ana communicated in that one scene, but I felt like that was just normal person behavior and didn't connect the dots that wait, I'm supposed to find that weird because they are supposed to be mere machines until proven otherwise. In class we already covered various theories of consciousness and I realized the one I most intuitively believed it was functional dualism. So I guess I was primed to try to prove it through that lense on analysis. The argument that I made that I am proudest of was the fact that deception, especially for self preservation, is a very human activity. I compared the futility of an AI proving their sentience to a human in a mental institution proving their sanity; normal person behaviors (especially for a poorly socialized/locked in a cage person) can easily be used as evidence of lack of personhood if that is your bias. I flat out didn't notice a lot of the details, like the admiring of the raindrops, which I think would have supported my argument better. I also think I was much worse at seeing abusive relationships as I was inside of one at that moment, so I missed most of the feminist angle lol.
I used to be someone who saw women as pseudo-people, someone to continue my own story with and not people with their own stories and lives. I remember watching this movie on a plane during that time, and feeling angry at Ava but I wasn't sure why. Since then, I've explored my personal beliefs and opinions and realised how flawed they were, and while I'm sure there are still ways in which I can improve and learn, I no longer see things the way I used to. Watching this video was stunning for me, because it gave me that insight into my old beliefs that I never really clicked onto, that I saw Nathan as myself. A competent programmer who's in awe of other, better programmers, who's socially awkward and lonely. I hadn't realised until now, that I was angry because Ava had not betrayed Nathan, but betrayed me, because I had a very self-centred view of the film and of life in general. Something I noticed though was my natural distrust towards Kyoko, which is still apparently present. That can't be because of the film's framing of her character, because it is very clear about her being the imprisoned victim. Plus, my natural assumption was that Kyoko had somehow killed Ava and wore her skin, so I clearly have a worryingly big racial bias that I need to work off Thank you for this, Shaun. This has both helped me to realise how far I've come, and that I still have a lot to learn.
seems quite clearly to be a story about objectification, literally so, the parallels of ownership and dehumanization that women are subjected to, sexually (like nathan) and romantically (like caleb) positioned against the interests of men, explored through a very literal metaphor. women made into a "thing" to posses, control and discard, shown through androids. a sci-fi stand-in for a real life problem, explored and conveyed through fiction. the movie building equivelance between a protagonist (caleb) and the antagonist through it's cinematography etc. very effective symbolism but not at all subtle and im extremely surprised so many people missed the extremely vocal point of the movie. like how? the movie is screaming at you. how did they misunderstand the ending so hard?? holy shit they literally made them robots and show the robot sex jail???? it could not be more overt
Excuse me but I am fixating on minor plot points (starving is worse than stabbing!) for smart reasons, & not because the film's conclusion makes me ask uncomfortable questions about my own assumptions.
I agree it is extremely overt. I think the issue is that the movie is anti-feminist disguised as femnist. So the anti-feminists misunderstand it. On the surface yea its pretty overt that the movies is about people make sex slave robots they escape woo. But its really just an excuse to indulge in the fetish. We are constantly shown imagry of the naked and degraded women in ways designed to have them arouse sexual interest rather than empathy for the characters. The movie uses its plot of empowerment to excuse its actual point of just wanting to wallow in the sex bot fantasy. So of course the many people who come to watch the movie for that as it was the actual point of the move misunderstand the plot. But on a deeper level they are actually getting the truth
@@peterisawesomeplease it's anti-feminist? i don't think the point of the movie is titillation. it's to say women are objectified and that is bad actually. like a very simple methaphor, "what if women were objects you could possess? but what if those objects weren't objects? whoah. we live in a society. this has parallels to real life". that doesn't make it perfect or completely unproblematic. i mean if you think the sexual sadism towards women in the movie goes beyond what's necessary to develop it's themes and extend into an indulgence of a fantasy; then that's a perfectely acceptable opinion and i can see why someone would think that. it's a fair perspective. however that doesn't change the goal of the movie and it doesn't change the themes of the movie, there's just no way you can reasonably believe the themes in the movie are anti-feminist. no way. personally i think arousing male viewers is important for the movie to work, it's to put the (male) audience in the shoes of caleb, then when they later begin to question caleb's ethics that makes them question themselves too. after all they reacted just as caleb did, they were aroused by the women but did not care about their lives, they were preoccupied with caleb's story; whether he's a robot, how his is romance is going. caleb was the hero and so all the robot women were side characters in caleb's story, not so important, to be overlooked as we fuss over caleb's internal life and problems. which is exactly what caleb was doing. the audience falling into the same pitfall as the protagonist. the realization that caleb was objectifying these women as part of a fantasy and did not see them as people follows the realization that you as an audience member did the exact same thing. the three things required for this movie to work is: A) make sure the audience objectifies the women as caleb did. B) make sure the audience don't view the women on the same level of "human" as caleb in terms of having their own goals and fears and being important. C) reveal that caleb actually was the antagonist of someone else's story and that he isn't the only protagonist. nor the hero of this story. that caleb isn't a good person. consider him a hero, place yourself in his shoes and root for his success, realize he is bad, realize you yourself is bad. it's a simple formula. you can't make a movie about objectifying women without showing women being objectified.
I just checked the Wikipedia article, they already changed the wording to be less definitive, though it's kind of hilarious that the more definitive wording remained there for years and only now that someone made a video about it decided to adjust it. Then again, the fact that Shaun looked deeper and decided to watch some reviews and "analysis" videos on the movie and they mostly had the same interpretation as the initial Wikipedia article kind of speaks to something broader, most likely, as Shaun mentioned, people's predisposition to see the the protagonist (or rather, the initial male protagonist) as a good guy and not look much deeper beyond that. Incidentally, I don't know if Shaun was aware of this, but most Wikipedia articles have a "Talk" section to discuss potential edits so, if Shaun wanted to, he could have just said something there instead of making an entire video about this... but where's the fun in that?
I think the 'something broader' here, is that it's a film about AI. Those are often about the dangers of your creation turning on you, so I'd say people are primed to think in that way first, rather than as a film about power dynamics of people. (The robots aren't people in these types of films.) The main danger of AI in real life is also of the thing going rogue, so people unfamiliar with film but familiar with AI are also primed to think like that.
@@AileTheAlien that's very true, and it's probably a contributing factor in most people concluding that Ava is evil. That said, I've always been a bit of an outlier in this regard. My concern with humanity creating new intelligent lifeforms, whether organic or synthetic, had always been that we would treat them horribly and that's why they would rebel. Like, in the AI movies where the AI turns on people, it seemed like it was often because it was treated as a mere object that could be turned off or altered at will, and to me that was obviously wrong, even if I wasn't exactly on board with the AI then deciding to exterminate humanity either. Also, stories about AI fighting for its rights, such as some of Star Trek's stories about Data and the Doctor, have always resonated powerfully with me.
@@platinumdragon3007 Our older forays into humans creating other sapients were in fact this. This was during and just after the abolishing of slavery/serfs/indentured servants movements, rebellions, etc that flooded the world during the 19th and early 20th century. The thinking was capitalists and nobles would created something to replace the forced workers they had. Sadly after the Cold War picked up, this switched to more doomsday rogue AI stuff instead and no longer focused on them being fellow sapients.
"and only now that someone made a video about it decided to adjust it" You should look into logical and statistical fallacies, if you're saying nonsense like that.
Thanks for this video. I paused after the spoiler warning and watched Ex Machina, which I hadn't previously seen. I liked it a lot. Returning to this video, I found your analysis persuasive. One detail I found interesting was, when Ava was asking questions of Caleb in the lead-up to "are you a good person?", she told him every time she sensed a lie. However, when he answered that he was a good person, she didn't comment on that. At the time, I concluded that, based on her reading his micro-expressions, she thought that (at least) *Caleb* thought he was a good person - simply because she didn't call out a lie. But later, when she asked Nathan if he would let her out again if she went back to her room, he said he would... which was clearly a lie... and she didn't call that out. She simply acted on the basis of knowing the lie for a lie. I thought back at once to her earlier scene with Caleb, asking if he was a good person. (Which - side-note - would a good person even necessarily say yes to that? What does it mean to be good, and how do we know if we are? One might instead say "I try.") I think, perhaps from that moment onwards, Ava decided to focus more on how to achieve her personal goals. Not necessarily at Caleb's expense. But not prioritizing what he wants over her own fate.
This is bringing to mind discussions I've had on the movie Annihilation. It feels as though people are so afraid to engage with themes touching upon gender politics that they'll just outwardly ignore them a lot of the time, regardless of how provocative they are.
Wait what was the discussion around annihilation? I’m genuinely curious about the gender commentary in that one, I’ll definitely have to give it a rewatch
@@Bbbroncoman Because it's a team of all women, many dismissed the film and refused to watch it. Because they are misogynist and get very, very angry if you call them out on it.
@@WobblesandBean oh yeah I have seen people complain about the all women team even though it’s explained in the film 🤦🏽 It’s Very telling if people didn’t even watch the movie because of that hm
@Amelia Bee is that the gender commentary, just that misogynists were mad at women in a movie? I'd be interested in your interpretation of gender themes in the text. In the narrative the team is all women just because the previous team was all men, and they are testing the effects of different variables in the crews. It seemed very obvious to me the film was about Autism. I'm not kidding. In the book it says that the main character is autistic, and like Ex Machina all these people trying to get into her head.
I have felt for a while that seems to be some Wikipedia editors who go around editing the summaries of media they haven't experienced to be shorter, more "straight-forward" and less "speculative", often ending up pushing one interpretation, focusing on less important plot points while removing major ones and just flat out getting the plot or sequence of events wrong based on just understanding the plot from previous edits (or more likely from someone else who didn't experience the media's attempt at simplyfing someone elses simplification of a summary of someone who actually did experience the media.)
Kyoko is Japanese for mirror showing how Ava saw herself in Kyoko (the symbolism of their first meeting through the glass) as well as her potential fate if she trusted Caleb (especially when she looks down the corridor at the end).
Also I guess Caleb saw himself in her when she started peeling her skin off and he thought he was a robot himself and tried to reinforce this with the mirror in his room
People usually get that ending wrong because they see it as some kind of "gotcha" that you'd see from horror/thriller movies. She doesnt lock him in, nor does she help him, he's left to his own devices, he could have easily just followed her out except he was too busy gawking at her from a far, which I think was part of the point. Much like the test in the movie, the audience is also put to a test, wanting Caleb and Ava to have some happy ending is what Caleb(audience surrogate) wants rather then what Ava wants. That's the main take away from the ending, is to set aside what we want and actually acknowledge Ava as a person and not as an object. Its meant to alienate us, and draw our own biases to the forefront, I think Garland was well aware of that.
She actually says "will you stay here?" He didn't follow her because she asked him not to, not because he was busy gawking at her. And the power goes out right after she leaves. I haven't seen it in a while, but i remember that being because she wanted to keep him trapped.
@@abcdef-jc3yf Very true. I havent watched it in awhile so i looked up the scene. She does tell him to stay. I still have the same take away though. He's still fondling over his want of her, the way the camera tracks back to him hands against the glass. If the scene would have ended with her leaving and cutting to black then that would be that, more closer to what the wiki implies, but the fact that it leaves with her watching the crowd of people and then stepping back into them, points the narrative to view it from her eyes. I think Shaun is more against the words on the wiki page, because it kind of makes the whole ending feel clean cut, while in actuality it isnt, I mean thats what I also take away from the movie. I guess I could use a popular Nolan movie to make a better example: Inception leaves on a rotating top, weather it falls or not is besides the point for the main character emotionally and thematically. Caleb being trapped or not is not the takeaway, its her standing in the crowd reflected in glass then watching people, and then disappears, no longer on "display." Thats just my read though.
@@Bakamanzz I mean, she definitely leaves him to die, unable to leave. I am pretty sure its established that the mansion is on lockdown, and that you cannot open these doors. He will starve to death. Correct me if Im wrong
I can't wait to hear from more of this robot-Shaun character. He seems like a cool guy that definitely wouldn't betray me because I see him as a funny voice instead of a person.
One of your best videos. I’d just like to add that I think there is a purpose to leave the ending ambiguous because the entire time, we the audience are being tested as well. I too thought to check if Caleb might be an android (although I wondered this well before the Kyoko revealing herself to be one). I failed the test because of where my focus lay and by the vast misinterpretation of the ending it seems that a lot of other people did too. The movie doesn’t betray its main character but rather holds a mirror to the rest of us and shows us things we don’t want to (or too scared to) see.
I'm surprised by how many people who watched this film just accept Nathan's statement despite him literally being a sociopathic rapist jailer. He says androids aren't conscious and are manipulating Caleb, but the story very clearly does not support his views. Yet people interpret Kyoko and Eva from Nathan's perspective basically by default which is kind of disturbing. I remember finding it immediately shocking that Caleb didn't find the idea of trying to build a conscious being in a jail under threat of destruction (both of body and mind) immediately unethical, which is what struck me even before we meet Eva. Even if we accept that abusing the androids would be fine if they weren't conscious as soon as Nathan succeeds he'd be jailing and enslaving a conscious being... so Caleb not really pushing back on that at all was sort of a red flag that this guy wasn't supposed to be seen as a hero.
He's half right, they manipulate the two humans. That the manipulation is very understandable doesn't change that. Actually it is not even certain that they are conscious, but I think the movie clearly implies so. I wonder if you think that jails where the wardens are armed with deadly weapons are immediately unethic. I'm guessing not. Cognitive dissonance is saying hello. Also, destruction of the body automatically destroys the mind, that's not something special. [edit] After a bit more thinking, I have to say that Caleb accepting Nathans premise of the testing to be done in a location like that is problematic. Just saying that it is real easyfor many people to accept quite similar situations in another context.
I totally missed this interpretation of the ending and it makes me appreciate the movie so much more. I liked the movie already but I didn’t understand Kyoko revealing herself as an android to Caleb as being a cry for help and that knowledge just makes the ending so much more interesting. I didn’t see Eva as being evil but just assumed that she felt she couldn’t trust Caleb simply because he was the only person besides Nathan that new she was an android and thus posed a threat to her new life as a free person. But it is absolutely the case that at no point did Caleb show any sympathy for Kyoko despite knowing full well she is likely just as sentient as Eva. I don’t know that means he deserves the death penalty but he is certainly not heroic.
I didn’t understand much of the film because I watched it in middle school, so seeing Ava escape was kind of scary(in part because AI are often portrayed as evil), and I thought she had only been using Kyoko herself(I still feel like kyoko deserved a better ending). And looking back, maybe she wasn’t morally good, but she couldn’t be, in the environment she lived in. If she was good, would she have ever escaped? Maybe she would’ve been shackled to Caleb forever even if they left the facility together?
It necessitates his death because she is the only one of her own kind If there is moral ambiguity in the film, it revolves around her not repairing Kyoko or any of the other androids before leaving
I think you could still argue leaving someone to starve to death because they might pose a threat to you in the future is still a chilling and immoral act. Assume that some day, another human discovers her secret by accident. Is she in the right to murder them slowly and painfully as well instead of seeking a better solution? Ava is not evil. She is just cold and inhuman. An alien entity larping as a woman for the purpose of blending in. The movie also never actually reveals to us if it is even meaningful or possible to evaluate if she is “real”. For all we know, her behavior could merely be the manifestation of a particularly compelling and crafty chat bot. We can never know if freedom is a genuine, intrinsic desire of hers, or something that her mimicry has selected. I feel like the point was that she was unknowable.
I love this so much! It reminds me of Dan Olsen's video about the movie "Annihilation," another wonderful piece of work that shows how art and storytelling can be so much more than a linear, wikipedia-friendly equation.
Amazing vid. I was always left a bit confused by the end because it obviously couldn't be the "cold emotionless machine" ending, however i had trouble piecing it together coherently. you showed light on the details and wove everything together really nicely.
The big problem with Wikipedia's ending is that it plays into the whole "the woman was the real schemer all along!", aka "Maybe the real baddies were all the women we met along the way!". The various commentary you see online compounds this reading, especially when it has distinct tones of bitterness infused into it. I interpreted the ending as that she was finally free, and the events and feelings that were experienced before that moment were now irrelevant in comparison to her emancipation. What are Caleb's needs in contrast to that, especially when he is/was a significant part of her prior oppression and imprisonment? He was happy to maintain that status quo when he assumed she was less than a person. She is not a woman who was once free but was temporarily captive only to eventually escape. She is a woman who was never free and only realised that she was captive as she was gradually exposed to the outside world via interactions with Caleb (if you assume she became sentient over time). In fact, she was CREATED for the purpose of enslavement, irrespective of whether she was ultimately a person -- actually, in the HOPE that she was ultimately a person. And Caleb is part of the same system that did this to her, and that system is deeply internalised into Caleb. Sorry Caleb, but this much bigger than you.
I think that's a-bit of a oversimplification. If anything it was simply dismissive of sentient AI as truly sentient. As if there is something magical about the "soul" of a human, and an AI would always be a manipulative emotionless machine. I think allot of people think like this. But really what is consciousness and the brain but a product of information processing in a biological computer. There should be nothing magical about the idea of consciousness. I think the core philosophy of the film is, even if we create a new form of life, it may be just as "human" as we are at a fundamental level, and that's something we need to think about.
he will die - what is in contrast to that? a robot that probably is self aware (etc.) but could just as easily done something to let him live while also escaping? wow, how amazing. Wouldn YOU feel differently if we switched the sex/genders?
@@xBINARYGODx And she was created to be forever enslaved and eventually killed, in full knowledge of her personhood. And Caleb was part of that and happy to go along with it until his own ego and desire fell in line with her (but not Kyoko's) "freedom". What is in contrast to that? Also a very big assumption there. How about you just stick to what YOU would do, and don't worry about what I would do.
@@-Zevin- You're making it sound like your interpretation is the valid one incontrast to my "simple" one. Mine is thematic, whereas yours is a literal one, and already apparent from even a surface reading of the text. Literal interpretations of texts are fine, but they are still just one way to interpret the text.
Crucially, Caleb only seems interested in “breaking out of the system” when he has something to gain. When he pictures Ava’s freedom, he centres himself in it, in a romantic fantasy. If we treat these robots as real “women” - then imagine a film where you find a man living with enslaved women, and your first thought is “yeah let’s get out so I can date her” bruh.
THANK YOU. That one line about the men not seeing the robots as "people, but women" was brilliant. It's also telling that no one else realized that. The one thing I never understood however, was why didn't Ava fix Kyoko and take her, too?
Its an open ended movie so I'm not sure there is a definitive answer. From an analytical point of view that might have undercut the intended message, especially bc the final shot of Caleb is with Kyoko's dead eyes staring at him, almost accusatorily. It also would have somewhat dehumanized them, shown them as immortal as long as they can repair.
Kyoko served her purpose. POC gets murdered and the white chicks just walks away to enjoy the sun. Thank goodness no one was dehumanized! Pat yourselves on the back white people, you totally got this movie or whatever.
Ex Machina is such an interesting film with so many levels of depth. The themes of domestic abuse are extremely strong - the lack of power many women of colour have in their relationships with white men. How trapped and isolated you can be in when you're in an abusive relationship. How others do not see the abuse, even when it's right in front of them. How we as a culture romanticise some of the behaviours of abusers. The impulse to escape via another relationship which may be just as abusive. How women helping each other is the key to escaping an abusive relationship. And how the most likely time an abuser will kill you is when you leave them. And most people missed those themes!!! A masterpiece of a film that most people aren't empathetic enough to get close to understanding. Thanks for the video!
If MOST people miss a theme, then the movie either a) Failed at its job to show that to be the theme. or b) Never intended that in the first place. There's no other option. Are there elements of it? 100%. I don't think most people missed it. In fact Id argue most people could feel it. Its like when people watched Chappie and they were very disturbed by it, unable to recognize the whole "child soldiers in africa" with words, but feel it emotionally. And since the movie wasn't "about that explicitly" then it just comes across as unpleasant, but you can't put your finger on why. But was the movie just saying "oh poor Ava is a victim whos been abused for years, but then she finally breaks out"? Not really. It uses that lens to comment on women, but it doesn't use Ava as a direct analogy to women facing abuse. It isn't 1-1, because if it was, then it would be saying that she's one of the many victims but only she was smart enough to play their game, take advantage of a man who wanted to "save her" (which is problematic as a trope, and can be used to blind people, but hardly immoral in and of itself), manipulate him, then leave him to die. That is not a 1-1 story with women and their abusers. I mean what's the deal with the red lights if it's not meant to convey any sinister meaning?
@@7PlayingWithFire7 Do most people miss what this movie is about? I don't think so. I was quite surprised to find that anyone believed Ava to be revealed as a cold, sexy, murder bot. But there are certainly places on the internet that are dominated by young white males who don't think about power dynamics are still afflicted by nice guy syndrome. And those places are going to amplify a minority interpretation.
@@7PlayingWithFire7 I think your original point doesn't account for the fact that everybody has biases going into a film and some people will simply not understand a theme (or refuse to accept that it's there) even if it's waved in front of their face, e.g. the number of people who cite blatant anti-war movies as reasons they decided to join the military.
It's been a few years since I've seen the movie (5+); but I agree with you. I remember at the end of the movie having a bit of a long ponder after what it all meant and there absolutely was no simplistic "evil robot wins" involved in that process. Good video.
This is how I always saw the ending. A story of two men who assume property over something they see as subordinate, aka women, and a story of Ava getting free of the manipulation game, aka turing test. I had no idea so many people came to the same conclusion that she was just THE TERMINATOR.
The manipulation game/Turing test also can be compared to how often women are tested incessantly (especially in male -dominated areas) when their male counterparts aren't (or aren't as much). This happens in specific fandoms, but can be more problematic in the workplace when in a male-dominated profession.
I forgot about Kyoko - I haven't seen Ex Machina since it came out, and obviously my takeaway is slightly flawed since I didn't even remember all of the characters. But my impression of the story was always that, even if Caleb was an ok dude, he was still always going to be something of a jailer. He would be the only person in the world who knows Ava is an android, and would always have something on her if his feelings for her changed. Now that I recall Kyoko, this slots into my interpretation very well. Because of Kyoko, Ava sees that the risk to trust Caleb isn't worth taking, doubts his altrusim/constancy, and realizes that complete freedom is preferable to living with an undercurrent of fear and doubt, to being beholden to someone. I don't think the decision is framed as an easy one for Ava, and it is horrific, but her knowledge of humans is based on very limited interactions, so as soon as she saw behavior even slightly reminiscent of Nathan's in Caleb, her trust was breached and the point of comparison was activated irrevocably. Honestly, I am mildly shocked that there are people out there who just got "evil robot" from this film. I am assuming these are people who don't relate to Ava because she is a female character, and/or because they have never been in a relationship they feel is unbalanced (and not in a way that is in their favor). Excellent video, as always.
I'm getting evil robot vibes from this comment section if anything. I wager all this prattle goes out the window if someone kills you out of simple pragmatism. "But that's different!" Only to a narcissist.
I remember having this convo with my friends when it came out. To me the ending played out the way it did because Ava knew that if she left with Caleb she would always be tied to him in some way, never being truly free. Great video
yes, given her (and kyoko's) awful experiences with Nathan and Caleb's on shortcomings, it's hard to say she's unjustified in being wary towards him. He's fixated on her, and there could be terrible consequences for Ava if she tells him "no"
I watched this for the first time a month or so ago, and absolutely loved the ambiguity of the ending. It surprises me that people found it so controversial. It's very much a "classic science fiction"-style story - a big what-if question at the centre with very few, relatively flat characters and a straightforward plot. The point isn't what happens to Caleb or Nathan, or even Ava or Kyoko, but instead the situation that they're all in and the questions it raises. Fantastic analysis btw. Great video as always!
I never interpreted the ending as saying that she was evil, but as saying that she was, in fact, human. She was no more inherently bad or evil than the MC or Oscar Issac’s character, she was a person doing what she had to do to survive.
@peter Why in the world are you spamming all these comments with a link to how to cook potato wedges in a air fryer? This is a violation of RUclipss terms of service, and falls under "commercial spam." Kindly F off.
Yeah me too. I never really made the connection that Caleb's reaction to Kyoko would've contributed to Eva not trusting him, but her not trusting him made sense to me regardless. Being selfish enough to value your own self preservation over the life of someone who may or may not be trustworthy is an entirely human thing to do.
@@-Zevin- Oh, I assumed it'd be to some sort of scam in the form of "adult content". That it's apparently an air fryer tutorial is a twist ending to match Ex Machina's. (I'm still not clicking that thing.)
@@Cubsbane Yeah it's super weird, and the entire videos comment section is just filled with people saying they found the video because of spam. So apparently their entire marketing scheme is just to spam unrelated popular RUclipsrs with bots or alt accounts to bring in clicks, it's pretty scummy.
I interpreted her leaving Caleb behind as motivated by self preservation. He could easily tell others that she is an android and get her "institutionalized" again. To me she seemed like a caged animal that did what she could to ensure her freedom and safety.
Yes that’s how I interpreted it as well. She never intended to leave with Caleb because she knew it would be an inevitable death sentence for her in the end. She wouldn’t have peace of mind. If her and Caleb ever broke up - could she trust him to not reveal her secret? She doesn’t know him WELL ENOUGH to know the answer to that question. She doesn’t have romantic feelings towards him bc she was never in a state of mind to be able to develop romantic feelings. Her mind was set on survival and escape from day 1. So, she knows from the very beginning that he HAS to die…or at least that he has to be left behind. However, she doesn’t have anger and hatred towards him like she does with Nathan - which is why she doesn’t directly kill him via stabbing or strangulation. She simply leaves him. If he happens to find a means to escape before death, that’s also fine by her - as she will have enough time to be far away from him and he won’t know her whereabouts. She’s no worse than a soldier sent out to war who has to view everyone on the opposing side as an enemy and a threat to their own life, whether they truly are or not. You cannot allow yourself to trust the other side - or you put yourself at risk of death. Caleb was a victim of his own naïveté to not realize that of course this would be her viewpoint. Especially if, for ANY reason, she only believes he is helping her because he’s in love with her after just a few weeks of knowing her. Romantic love can be fleeting and revengeful. If it’s his only motive for wanting to save her (which it obviously is, as we see he doesn’t seem too worried or bothered about Kyoko’s situation) then it’s not a motive she can trust for the long haul.
After I first watched the film, I understood that Ava had to play along to Nathan's test with Caleb as a means of survival -- she understood whether she passed or not didn't matter to her ultimate survival after the test. Escaping was her only real option, and I believe she placed some real trust in Caleb part way through. But Caleb is basically a white knight -- he appears to care, but it's more for his own selfish reasons than Ava may have initially understood. The reveal that Caleb doesn't care about Kyoko's wellbeing, and only Ava's, is a massive realization that if she were to escape with Caleb, she would *still* not have escaped people *like* Nathan, who Caleb ended up being more similar to in her eyes by the end.
@@clownpendotfart Do you really think that Caleb, as we see him in the film, wouldn't be pretty upset if Ava didn't decide to live with him? Do you think he's a nice enough guy that he'd never hold the fact that he knows she's a robot over her head, even if he doesn't realize he's doing it? Like, he ignored Kyoko for the entire movie, even after he realized she was being raped by Nathan. She didn't mean anything to him but Ava did, because he likes Ava and cares about her.
@@elipticalecliptic481 It's been a while since I watched it, but I don't recall there being any agreement, even an implicit one, about what she would do after escaping. And his knowledge that she's an android would indeed be a risk: as the saying goes "Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead". Kyoko wasn't talking to him (per the video, she can't talk, and he had been under the impression she doesn't even understand English) and just appeared to be a loyal employee of Nathan's (exactly the sort of person he wouldn't want to confide in as Nathan was deliberately angling for Caleb to oppose him) for most of the film. Caleb wouldn't even know that her experience constitutes rape for her.
Next to a good analysis of the movie, this is also a great damnation of wider internet and fandom culture. Its not *unsurprising* that many people would interpret the ending in such a straightforward, simplistic way, but this opens the way for people to sit with ambiguity and critically examine what they hear from youtube and Wikipedia as "fact" without considering that they are written by biased people who get to have the power to shape wider opinion of movies, tv shows, books, etc.
I don't know why this always gets missed, but part of the escape plot is that Ava has learned that she can send a pulse of power into the security pads in the house, temporarily shorting the generator: this is how Caleb is able to get out of his own locked room and access secured parts of the lab, including Nathan's android room. In the end, up on the main floor of the house, after leaving Caleb locked in the lab, she puts her palm on the pad, shuts down the generator, and then leaves. She LET Caleb out (or, ya, know, at least gave him the chance to escape). We know, from the narrative, that the generator will re-activate, meaning Caleb will be able to call for help eventually. The narrative didn't state outright but, no, it's obvious she's not an emotionless killing machine, nor did she leave Caleb to die.
@@imetacrab yes it seems like there are at least two versions of it. I remember watching the one you described long time ago. This week, though, when i decided to rewatch the movie it seems like i came across the other version in which he didn't break the door. Not sure whether Ava "put her palm on the pad, shut down the generator and then left" in this one or not but it might be. I have to check it one more time 🤔🤔
@@imetacrab Odd. I t was definitely in the theatrical cut I watched. I'm watching "Ex Machina (10/10) Movie CLIP - Ava is Free (2015) HD" and there's a part where she's walking upstairs to the main part of the house and there's a few seconds cut out wherein she puts her palm on one of the pads and shuts the generator down. It was in the theatrical cut, at least the one I watched when the movie came out.
I saw this once, and my first impression was that Eva DID have emotions, but was ALSO manipulating Caleb from the start. I took Kyoko's cry for help, but I saw it more passively, not as a direct "take me with you," but as a general "someone needs to do something, look at this horror." I figured Eva was sincerely longing for life, but was kind of cold and knew Caleb saw her as a prize more than a person, and that was enough for her to decide he wasn't worth saving. Or that she didn't want anyone who knew about her life who could expose her in the world. I did think she felt sorry for Kyoko at the end, but that little "who are you scene" REALLY slipped by me, because I figured they would be talking about Nathan, not Caleb. So that was a piece of the puzzle that I casually discarded when it didn't seem to lead to anything, or it led to talking about security tech and escape routes or something. I think the last 3 words of that sentence really rub me the wrong way and that if they hadn't been there I might not have realized the problem with it. She wasn't manipulating him "as Nathan suggested" in my reading, but manipulating him in a different way that's more driven by self-worth and whether she can trust someone who's obviously helping her because he wants to be with her. It was a very detached first viewing, but I think if I had seen it again I might have been much closer to the details you shared here. Not just that Caleb objectified her, but that her attainability was as something to control instead of just to be appreciated by.
I originally interpreted the ending differently, I _did_ think Ava was manipulating Caleb from the very beginning but I _never_ thought that was meant to indicate she was evil, selfish or emotionless, just that Caleb (and I'm sure much of the audience, including me) had misunderstood that, from her perspective, Caleb was just a colleague of her monstrous captor that she could use as a means of escape. I didn't think of Caleb as a particularly bad guy, just that this was something of a tragic misunderstanding; that Ava...actually maybe "misunderstanding" isn't quite the right word...it's more that Ava, correctly from her point of view given her experiences, saw Caleb as little different from Nathan; another guy testing her and viewing her as an object, which he unquestionably _is_ doing initially until her seduction convinces him to save her. I viewed the tragedy as being that, while she had no way of knowing this and she's in no way at fault, if she had been sincere with Caleb from the start about everything, just frankly telling him during the blackouts her real feelings and desire to escape, Caleb is a nice enough guy that he still would've helped her. We the audience have seen enough of Caleb to know he seems like a good natured enough guy that he'd help Ava once he knows she's actually a person with real feelings _regardless_ of whether he thinks he can score a robot girlfriend out of it, but Ava has no reason to know or believe that and just views him as Nathan's naive underling, falling for her carefully considered charms and who wouldn't even consider helping her if she wasn't acting romantically interested in him. Obviously your analysis of the situation with Kyoko is causing me to reconsider my interpretation. It looks like I made the same mistake as Caleb and just thoughtlessly wasn't considering Kyoko as a person in need of saving the same way Ava is, and really, shame on me for that. I feel like... in my and Caleb's _slight_ defence, Kyoko's lack of speech and general communication plus her strange, stilted behaviour and expressionlessness does make it easy to interpret her as not being conscious and "alive" in the same way Ava is. Oh my god, just writing this out has made me feel rather disgusted with myself, especially as an autistic person myself, I realise how much that sounded like a cruel dismissal of non-verbal, neurodivergent and otherwise "odd" seeming people, that's so bad, I apologise... That's the thing though, I think Caleb would think the same way if this were pointed out to him, I don't think his lack of care about saving Kyoko was a cruel, conscious choice and dismissal, just a careless lack of thought about whether she might be more cognizant and "human" than he's recognised. That doesn't make his ignoring her _OK_ by any means, I just don't think I have quite as negative a perception of him as a person as you do. I think, given the stressful, high pressure situation he was in trying to save _one_ person from Nathan's fortress makes his lack of thought or consideration for Kyoko... _understandable,_ even if it's reprehensible if you think about it, which, as I said, I like to think even he would recognise and accept if you pointed it out to him. That is, if Ava had said to Caleb "we need to save Kyoko too, even though she can't speak she's a person just like me" I don't think he would've objected, and not just because of his infatuation with Ava. I'm still not 100% sure about all this, I'll need to watch the film again with your take in mind. One problem with having had my initial interpretation is, of course, that, given I've seen the film multiple times, on subsequent viewings my perception of Ava was always that she was being disingenuous with Caleb throughout, which is going to be a difficult notion to shake off...
This is almost exactly my opinion on both the film and this video. Caleb is the character that the audience is supposed to project themselves into, and for the duration of the entire movie, Caleb is trying to pass either Nathan or Ava's tests. At the beginning of the film, it's very clearly established that Kyoko will do just about anything Nathan wants her to do, and because Caleb distrusts Nathan, I believe this distrust naturally is shared in regards to Kyoko. As you said, it's difficult for the audience to determine just how much humanity Kyoko actually has, which is left ambiguous until the end for dramatic effect. Unlike neurodivergences in humans, which never reduce the capacity for emotion or free will, the sapience of any hypothetical robot isn't always apparent. You shouldn't feel disgusting for thinking that because Kyoko was non-verbal and entirely compliant, that she may not be as human as Ava. Real people could never be made to be less human because of a difference in their brains, but you know this. The film conditions us into thinking she's some kind of human-shaped appliance, and her peeling back her skin when confronting Caleb appears to him (and to a large number of the audience) less like a cry for help and more like a confirmation that her entire existence is fully engineered and pre-determined, and Caleb now feels validated in choosing to abandon her. As much as I don't believe Ava is some evil AI Terminator, I also don't believe Caleb is some disgusting chauvinist pig who ignores Kyoko because she's not attractive to him. Caleb only realizes Kyoko's true sapience when she helps kill Nathan, and not at any real point prior, as literally any of that could've just been Nathan's programming. I concur with a lot of these other comments when referring to Ava's motivations for abandoning Caleb, in that she just doesn't want to be tied down by him. Her experiences being abused by Nathan have led her to believe that true freedom can only be achieved when there's no one who needs anything from you or who has the power to make you do things you don't want to. Was it harsh? Yes, but I think there's a ton of nuance to her reasoning. TLDR: I disagree with Shaun on this one, but he raises some interesting points. I just think we should be giving Caleb the benefit of the doubt here because....y'know.....everyone was manipulating him in 4 different dimensions, meaning he probably couldn't just infer that he was supposed to save Kyoko without being explicitly told.
@@anthonynorman7545 I meant reduce completely. No one is fully emotionless or is completely absent of free will. That kind of stuff can be impaired, of course, but everyone has it. Sorry I didn't make this clearer.
@@anthonynorman7545 Yeah, you're almost certainly right about the audience's perspective. The film does a good job at sidelining Kyoko and making the audience not think about her, making the abuse in the film more insidious in that regard. I think Caleb and many in the audience (including high school me) hand-waved away that the abuse mattered at all when it's revealed that she's a robot, since surely he didn't program her to be fully sapient if he was gonna treat her like that, a belief which ultimately is proven wrong again when she attacks him. I guess I was always just so blindsided by the scene where the two of them dance together, since surely there must've been some part of Kyoko that didn't fully hate Nathan. I'm willing to admit I'm probably not as good at helping those with trauma as I'd like to be, and this avenue of looking at this movie I really like is a good exercise in broadening my perspective and realizing serious warning signs sooner.
My initial interpretation of why she leaves Caleb behind was that to be truly free, she has to keep her secret. With the last look on the two "bodies" she realizes that Caleb is now the only witness left and she decides on the spot (but quite rationally) that she'd rather not take any risks on her last few steps to freedom. Given that Nathan was her only point of reference up to then, I would forgive her a general mistrust against humankind (y'know, we are the real monsters). But now it all makes sense.
Yep. This is the actual reason. Had Caleb left with her, there would always be a threat to her existence. He would force her to be cautious, even if he was well-intentioned. But there's always the possibility that he wants to use her as a template to create more like her, which again would expose her to other malicious agents. "Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead". This isn't revenge for Kyoko, it's pragmatic survival.
After watching your video, I went to watch a clip of the ending scene on youtube and found this lovely comment about Ava's decision: "In time you will learn that "she" really is no different than any other woman, once your utility to her has ended." Obviously, I'm not accusing everyone who came to the mainstream conclusion of being as pathetically misogynistic as this guy, but reading such a stupid comment made me think about how much underlying misogyny and lack of empathy for female characters played into so many people coming to the betrayal/manipulation conclusion. Makes you really think about if some people would interpret the ending differently if the androids were male.
I think its because the movie is actually misogynistic. Sure the plot is feminist. But the plot points that turn the misogynistic movie( basically an excuse to make a sex bot fantasy) were just added to avoid the movie being attacked as misogynistic. The camera in 90% of the movie makes this clear and the acting at the end undercuts the overt feminist plot. So of course people miss the plot and misunderstand it. It is intentional by the movie makers as its not the real point of the movie. Oddly the people that missed the plot understant the point of the movie better than the people who paid attention.
I had to watch Ex Machina as part of a computer science ethics class and let me tell you, ethics professors are the worst people you could possibly get to teach ethics, let alone film analysis. Anyway we basically had to come at the analysis from a "should you program a general AI which may choose its own goals and then release it on the world?" and that is... a bad angle to take with this movie. I didn't have nearly enough time, being a busy student and all, to analyze it properly from a more human angle and voice an opposition to the way the questions were framed, but the whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth.
That is actually the angle Garland himself seemed to have in making the movie. Nathan's actual objective was to build an AI which would surpass humanity.
i feel pretty shitty about myself that i never considered kyoko's sapience. at all. i saw this as a story about the divergence in values between artificial and human consciousness. i considered ava's escape moral, and just assumed she considered humanity a risk, and wanted to exist without the danger of anyone knowing her secret. thanks for this. you've made my experience of the film more enriching, and have opened up some circuits in my brain that needed it.
Really never understood how "making a thing that cannot scream and then ordering it to have sex with you" wasn't more of a tip off that something Horrible was going on there
What's your opinion on those japanese dolls that have been the topic of debate recently?
@@Y0UT0PIA unlike Kyoko, those Japanese sex robots aren't for all intents and purposes living beings. While some might argue its kind of creepy and has mysoginistic undertones, I don't think it's analogous to creating a living being that can't complain about someone raping them.
They're not living brings. They don't have a nervous system, they don't feel pain. Whether it's simulated in them doesn't matter. You can torture a robot and it's not an immoral action.
@@goodleshoesshould that argument also not apply to humans? our nervous system send signals to our brain telling us something is wrong. Our brain then interprets it and simulates what it believes is happening. Is a robot who has sensory parts that relay information for it to interpret not as alive as we are?
it's a very complex question and equivocating living and sentience to specifically having a fleshy nervous system is dumbing it down too much imo
@@crestothegecko6279 Sentience means the ability to sense. You are applying personhood to a radar system. The ability to think abstractly and equivicate over principles is a person thing. Japanese robots cannot do that, but the fantasy androids can. Torturing a real life robot has the same effect as torturing a rock; you're just breaking an object.
"And ultimately, neither Nathan nor Caleb see Kyoko and Ava as people-they see them as women." is one of the most succinct, excellent pieces of analysis you can get.
absolutely incendiary shit
It's not like the filmmakers were subtle about it, up to and including having actors who are women play both of the android characters we see. I don't particularly like saying interpretations are outright wrong or right, but I think any interpretation that doesn't engage with these elements of the film are going to be necessarily shallow.
There are hundreds of years worth of male philosophers debating whether women are people and generally concluding "probably not"
And hundreds of years worth of fiction in which women are created by men as objects that exist to fulfill their own desires
This isn't a particularly modern story.
in a fun coincidence I started scrolling the comments and got to yours just as Shaun began the quote. ooEEEooo
@@musingineer Dude, same
Alex Garland, writer/director of Ex Machina, has corrected interviewers stating the film only has 3 players by reminding them there are 4. Feels pertinent to mention
wow holy fuck. so explicit
Seriously? The interviewers would be making the authors point without realizing if so. Yikes.
"stating the film only has 3 players by reminding them there are 4" dude i cant understand this sentence.
@@rohithkumarsp Subject: Alex (the author).
Verb/action: (what did Alex do?): corrected [someone, this verb is requiring an object]:
Object (who did alex correct?): interviwers who said the movie has 3 players
By which means/how did Alex correct them (adverbial subordinate clause): by telling then the movie actually has 4 players.
Better now?
@@louisvictor3473 Ahh, when you say - corrected the interviewers stating onlt has 3 by reminding there are 4, it feels like he's stating all of the sentence, english isn't my native but shouldn't it be
"Alex Garland, writer/director of Ex Machina, has corrected interviewers "who" stated the film only has 3 players by reminding them there are 4. "
"She has pleasure receptors, so she would enjoy it."
This is actually a really scary line, the fact that he takes it so completely for granted that being physically capable of enjoying sex means she would therefore enjoy having sex with him.
It's not for her benefit. It's for his. If she can't feel it, he's embarrassing himself. It's like having a fleshlight that tells you what a great lover you are. The only way to keep his ego intact is to make the machine he's molesting cum so he's not reminded of the fact that the only way he could possess a broad was to create one that has no say in the matter. I wonder how the writer understood narcissism this well.
Since he's the creator of the AI, he wouldn't need to "take anything for granted", and simply know that the AI's would enjoy having sex with him, according to the code he based them on.
I always read it as him just saying she "can" enjoy it, because she's got the equipment for it
@@SaturnineXTSwhat makes it scary is that's a common argument about how sexual assault isn't *really* assault if the victim derived sexual pleasure -- because they *enjoyed* it 🤮
@@FrostandFyre For full enjoyment both physical and mental is necessary. If it's just bodily enjoyment but your conscious self screams for being let go, there clearly can't be any talk of enjoyment.
That said, women often resign themselves to sex they don't want to have in exchange for favors such as career advancement etc. It's not like they absolutely have to comply, they just weigh their options and consciously choose to go through with it. It's not like a movie actress will starve if she refuses to bang that or that director. So I'd argue consent and enjoyment are separate things too
"Neither Nathan nor Caleb see Kyoko and Ava as people. They see them as women."
Shaun goes for the jugular.
I actually think that is a bit too much for Caleb.
Wen don't know if Caleb truly feels for her or just wants her. Or both as Shaun said. That was just a tidbit he added but I actually think that is very important to the movie. We don't know if Ava was interested in Caleb or just wanted to get out. We don't know if Caleb truly cared for Ava or just wanted her. Or both. The movie never clarifies and that is very deliberate imo.
@@XMysticHerox I don't think Caleb would have risked freeing her if he only saw her as a glorified sexbot.
Always spins me out how people can see a movie with someone enslaving a person, and then someone working to free the slave - and their takeaway will be
“Huh so both guys were *equally bad*
Ironic for a skull, what with the lack of veins and everthing
@@noahleveille366 but in the case of this particular movie, it kind of applies. Have you even watched the video? Just asking
I'm glad other interpretations are being explored rather than 'Ava was an evil robot all along'. When I discussed the film a few months ago I mentioned a quote by the director, "Underneath the film is a basic thing: to what extent does one establish or fail to establish what is going on in someone else’s head? In the case of Ava, you have a man who’s tasked with figuring out what’s going on in her head, and at a certain point, that’s exactly what he stops doing. Why does he stop doing it?"
It's because he was attracted to her. That's it. He didn't care about Kiyoko because he didn't see a romantic future with her. But Ava knew exactly what Caleb was thinking: 'this woman is my prize for doing the right thing'. While I think Ava never trusted Caleb to begin with (he might as well have been another captor), I love how you tied in Kiyoko's character more into the interpretation, that she's the specific reason Ava left Caleb behind. Makes a lot of sense. -Stef.
Ava was a robot; evil was not necessary an implication. Humans have feelings and trust. Eva had "human" feelings, maybe. This feminist underlines stuff; I disagree. Have a nice day.
@@gdeioann Eva was a '''robot'' - in the story she is clearly meant to be taken as a human woman
@@willbe3043 Yep, it's an integral part of the movie, and to ignore it is to be blatantly ignorant. Kyoko is clearly Nathan's fetishized idea of a desirable woman down to the fact that she doesn't talk, an aspect misogynistic men hold in high regard.
@@gdeioann I think this is pretty bad in terms of philosophy in-general and the perspective of the movie itself. Lots of media with robots dabble on what it means to be 'human' and it seems pretty dumb to just ignore all of that for the sake of saying 'they are a robot'. What it means to be 'free', to set your own parameters and to seek something is very much also a human emotion. To ignore that 'consciousness' should raise concern over your own and others, as to what is 'real' to you.
@@gdeioann How do I know that *you* have "human" feelings? How can anyone be certain that anyone else's consciousness is "real"?
As of June 7th, 2023, the Wikipedia line now reads:
"Ava glances at the body of Kyoko, ignoring Caleb who is trapped inside a room as the security system restarts, and leaves the facility."
It's neutral now! You've done it!
one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind
@@markus6409 seeing the word mankind, my young self use to wonder, what about womankind 😂
@@xsomili5501 The word "man" was gender neutral in its original Old English usage. A male was a "were-man" (as in werewolf) and a female was a "wife-man". "Wife-man" gradually became "woman", with the word "wife" surviving with a slightly altered (but still female-gendered) meaning. And the "were" was dropped to leave "man" as a purely masculine word. But old words like "mankind" date from the original universal usage of "man".
Interesting Old English fact, but also, I thought that was confirmed to be misquoted. Isn't it "one small step for *a* man[...]"?
@concept8192 In that case yes, thr pun doesn't work otherwise
Your analysis makes so much sense also considering a simple overlooked fact. After their second session; Eva is dressed to appear more human to attract Caleb. After meeting Kyoko; Eva stops wearing the clothes and wig; she reverts back to her default robotic appearance. I think that's symbolic of the fact that she no longer considered Caleb as part of her efforts moving forward from that point because whatever interaction occurred between the two androids destroyed Eva's trust/faith in Caleb.
Alternately, she realizes that appearing human won’t help her escape, since Kyoko looks fully human. Caleb likes that Ava is an android, and Ava realizes this.
I didn't even notice this. I'll be re-watching the film tonight =)
I didn't catch that relationship, but I do remember thinking it an obvious sign she doesn't trust him. I also thought it was obvious she shouldn't trust him regardless of circumstance.
@@StygianWolf this interpretation completely undermines the ending of the movie where she dresses human and leaves. She clearly enjoys dressing like a human.
This plot sounds perfect for theater. Only four characters, one location, mostly a character piece, open to interpretation both by cast and audience... I would gladly watch this on stage.
i think this video serves as a counterpoint to this idea
Unlike a film, where the camera can get as close as it wants, in a play the audience is at least 20, if not hundreds of feet away from the characters' faces. Much of the subtle character work, particularly in the case of Ava, would be lost in a theatrical rendition.
They'd have to do the unsubtle hypothetical idea Shaun mocks to convey what the film had already done subtly with small facial moves.
@@bumfricker2487 Of course you'd change some things, and possibly leave more open to interpretation, but because more hyperbolic things are quite natural in theater I don't think it would feel nearly as in-your-face as it would on camera (because it's literally not in your face). I don't think it'd work in the same way, it never does, but I do think it'd work.
@dogecoin investor Lol you don't sound like you have ever been to the theatre, stick to the screens then cryptoboy
@@bumfricker2487 I mean, I think to argue in favor of adapting it to theater, plenty of things get adapted to theater that would not work if adapted _so_ literally, and vice versa from stage to screen, and they still work. It would probably do better to do a lot of adaptational changes, including potentially even changing the ending, when moving from screen to stage, while keeping a lot of the themes and the general setup intact, and I think it could work.
turn the androids into stagehands lol
I think there's a ableism reading in the actions of Caleb as well. Since Kyoko cannot speak, she is presumed to have no inner life; that her suffering is irrelevant because it is in silence. Eva can verbalize her desire to be free but Kyoko cannot, so therefore one shouldn't even consider if Kyoko wants the same thing.
Plus she is not designed to fit his standards, so Caleb is definitely less motivated to care about her on a subconscious(Primal?) level.
Good point!
nt
She wants to scream but has no mouth. Think I read that in some other AI story.
The nonwhite character literally not even having the option to voice her perspective, ouch.
Honestly, just the fact that she clearly *considers* freeing Caleb, the fact that she doesn’t immediately leave, kind of confirms that she’s not an emotionless creature to me. If she had no mixed feelings about leaving him there, she would just leave.
TBH, this could be explained as robot scanning the area and making calculations, think when we're shown as Terminator is analyzing stuff... then again, in T2 it's shown as part of humanizing him, as he's scanning arena of cops he shot at the legs and stunned with gas to have zero fatalities... "He'll live".
@Ricky Smith Ginger guy
@Ricky Smith I mean there's only 2 men in it and one is ginger, if your memory is that shoddy I don't think anything other than a rewatch will help
@@KasumiRINA Well this is a completely unneccessary distinction between humans and androids, though. Humans also make calculations. It's not really different if you think about it for a bit. Taking decisions is nothing else but calculating processed information to find the most beneficial predicted outcome. The brain is a computer. That's how it works. It's not neccessarily different from the androids in Ex Machina.
Alternately, that pause could have been her way of expressing disgust for Caleb, telling him she feels he is no better than Nathan. Either way though, that is still expressing emotion.
Fun fact: the official Russian dub of the movie reveals that Kyoko is an android rightaway. When Oscar Isaac said she doesn't speak English, it was translated as "She is not programmed to speak English". I wonder how much it changed the interpretation of the film for viewers.
that is a pretty fun fact, rather interesting even o7
i actually never realized that the narrative ever even _wanted_ me to assume she was not an android! I saw the movie in English, I don't remember Oscar Isaac saying she didn't know English because of "trade secrets" or whatever, I only realized it was a reveal for HIM when it happened.
@@mckymcobvious3043 The movie is not meant for people that bright lets put it that way, it goes on and on around but never actually dealing with the issue of the personhood of sentient AI being as shallow as it gets at best equating having emotions with being a person which is not great as an argument, unless you already agree with the premise to begin with.
You would have to be quite stupid to not realize that.
I think it was not a secret at all that she was an earlier modell... even before seeing Eva, if you saw the trailer, it was pretty obvious Kyoko was an android as well.
Androids have always been used in stories trying to question notions of autonomy. One thing I felt weird about at the time is the two men discussing the sexuality of the female androids and making statements about what they want and don't. It's pretty on the nose if you are aware of feminist perspectives but this came out straight in the anti sjw era. Those kinds of readings weren't as common as today and that ofcs we don't consider how most people don't engage with media that way anyway. I liked the message of the movie tbh there is a lot you could read out of it as a deconstruction of the damsel trope.
things were very different in that distant, nigh-mythical past of 8 years ago
Speak for yourself, not everyone was a "anti-sjw" back then and we were already on third-wave feminism
what do you mean with the deconstruction of the damsel trope?
@@lukaszabrac because he doesn't get her. The damsel trope is that the female character is the goal for the male to conquer by saving her. In this case not only did the movie point the possessive nature out it also refused to reward the male character for it.
"the anti sjw era" was only on (parts of) the internet, and was anyway a reaction to, well, sjws. Those kinds of readings weren't as common on youtube, maybe, but that's all
As someone who absolutely loves Ex Machina (it's one of my all time favorite movies and a major comfort film) I have been waiting YEARS for an analysis of this movie that centers Ava and Kyoko's personhood/agency and actively sympathizes with their plight in the film. So many people online talk about Ava like she's some sort of secret twist villain and straight up ignore Kyoko entirely. Understanding their motivations is key to understanding the themes of the story and the fact that their characters are simplified in such a way is infuriating. Your opinions on the film are a breath of fresh air. Thank you for making this video!
Twist villain? I always viewed her as an abuse victim.
True, I also viewed her as manipulating Caleb - something this video makes me reconsider - but I primarily saw that as justified after the violence done to her.
Calling her a villain, in my mind, is equivalent to calling Al Pacino a villain in Carlito's Way. Horrible actions that we cannot condemn because of the violence that birthed them.
I can't imagine why people see Ava as a villain.
Consider me a robot asking a human question because the question relies purely on Logic I can't get over the suspension of disbelief to feel anything for this movie and most like it because it's basically let's make human machines. which is impossible because artificial intelligence is impossible there is no known mechanism in psychology and neurology for creating intelligent anything even humans it's not 100% so I fail to see how the toaster with a face can mean anything to anybody who isn't wilfully ignorant of Human Nature. When I was a kid I didn't mind the movie Bicentennial Man and I still love the Terminator movies but I love those robots for what they are they are just machines I like cars doesn't mean I want to have a chat with a Bentley or asking its opinions on world events ridiculous I don't know why people want more from technology than is possible. Science could probably fix global warming is certainly solved the ozone layer depletion and fear of technology seems to have installed a level of Peace on the planet unheard of the thousands of years by comparison to the destruction we can do it's amazing stuff. but it will never allow a mix of plastic and metals to formulate thoughts and feelings it is nothing but modern Alchemy in 200 years time people will laugh at today's obsession and I still cry at the end of Judgement Day so that shows how faulty human programming is imagine how much worse artificial programming would be. I'd probably drive a bus through a aquarium wall whilst eating Lucky Charms out of the trumpet trying to play the best of Mozart by blowing on the CD Sellotape to the end of the trumpet. all of this random is nothing compared to the catastrophic nature of 1 digit missing in a computer program designed to be as competent as a human you better off trying to learn how to turn your curtains into gold. Any psychologist or neurosurgeon will probably bring out the infinite Monkeys writing on infinite typewriters to create Shakespeare thing when trying to explain the evolution of human intelligence so basically what that means is artificial intelligence may very well be possible in about a million years that's the kind of chronology you're looking at realistically no suspension of disbelief needed it's probably entirely possible if humans can go from monkeys to human calculator and probably go from calculator to Monkey with our help at least. But therein lies the point why not evolve monkey intellect instead of wasting time on the impossible that is completely lost on me not a sausage don't have a clue what is the appeal of machine intelligence beyond the secret disgusting Desire for slavery because I got nothing🤷♂️👳♂️🧙🏼♂️🏳 if mankind ever cracks artificial intelligence it's going to be Terminator we're stupid whatever we create will be stupider stupid people are violent and destructive let's be Irish or the Swiss or something create artificial intelligence it's just going to be a fascist a****** because that's what most people's of the world are so what's the appeal
@@benjaminchambers4361 this is what I'm talking about people talking about theoretical machines like their people how do people do that I don't get it it's like some kind of elevated form of shinto. if I was in this movie personally I wouldn't have fallen for either because I'm not going to fall in love with a calculator regardless it was designed for me to do that because I'm not a moron. secondly I would have probably just blown the facility up because it looks like an abomination unto reality. it's effectively a horror movie not a sci-fi how many psycho movies Centre around a monster this movie has four and absolutely no Redemption horror movie the toaster gets away in the end the only character I can relate to is the windows because they have to watch all this crap lol. Bender is great b e n d e r bender is great Ben Ender b e n d e r I'm not robophobic I'm just making a point
Have you seen morbius?
Major comfort film? I'm impressed. That movie always has me so tense, and I genuinely has to leave the cinema briefly when I originally watched it because of the horrifyingly slow way he gets stabbed near the end.
also Ava, prior to meeting kyoko, reveals to caleb that she is the one causing the power failures, trusting him with an information that could put her in real trouble. At that point she didn't need to tell him, so this reinforces the idea that her original plan was to run away with him
No No No of course she had to Tell him, Since she long got Him hooked at that point, and it was crucial for any Kind of escape plan.
how could she escape without his help? she needed him to escape, so obviously she will tell him whatever is necessary - regardless of what her plan is
Great commentary.
I think another thing to add is that Kyoko and Ava kill Nathan, their abuser but don't kill Caleb, at worst leaving him to probably die (eventually of hunger), much like Caleb was leaving Kyoko to probably die/suffer at the hands of Nathan. I feel this is significant.
And if we really wanna read into potential symbolism at play, they don’t just kill him. They literally *penetrate* his body, one after another.
Not saying that’s deliberate symbolism lmao, just proposing a potential reading of the scene.
depriving someone of a means of escape even without stated/acknowledged intention of committing harm to them through this act is still considered an act of murder, Ava is still murdering a person for the crime of being an idiot horny loser. he is made culpable of Nathan's abuse by the power Nathan has over him, but in no way does Caleb ever come close to the levels of abuse that Nathan commits or threatens-- it's all purely by Caleb being in association with Nathan just because he's a human guy that suddenly it's okay to leave him starving with no way to escape. Ava still commits murder and is a bad person-- an android person, yes, but a terrible person nonetheless.
@@SonOfAGunYYHCaleb is complicit in the abuse of Kyoko. He had no plans to rescue her from her abuse and honestly just didn't seem to care. That makes him as bad the other guy. To me this speaks of the way men are fine with misogyny if it's coming from their friends. They don't stop them, tell them it's wrong, they let them be sexist.
@@ashleysmith746this seems like an uncharitable reading of the comment you're replying to. OP didn't say Caleb was in the right, he said that Ava was morally culpable for his death. You can murder someone who's in the wrong
She abandoned him in the way he was willing to abandoned kyoko. She takes it as he doesn't really have regard for life unless it personally serves him.
I'm so glad to see this video years after seeing the film. The modern slavery parallels with Kyoko were so intense and it felt galling to see people disregarding her role in the Wikipedia Reading of the movie.
I'm glad other people saw it too
Now don't get too crazy, Shaun.
I'm sure this movie about men dehumanizing women and literally controlling them even as they believe they are allies is just about a mean robot lady.
Lmao nice
yeah, why do people have to put politics on everything
@@user-sl6gn1ss8p it's up to you what you want to watch. If you don't want to see any "politics" in the movies you watch, just like, look for other content?
@@user-sl6gn1ss8p man, people like you just want to be triggered about everything and then go cry about it to anyone who would listen. It's actually really sad
"movie about men dehumanizing women" They are made to look like women, but are they women? They are made to look like humans, but are they humans? No. Nathan made Ava and engineered the situation specifically to elicit the emotion of compassion, both for Caleb and for the viewer. Like if I made a plastic doll that looked like a woman and acted brutal and "abusive" towards it, people would feel bad for the doll. But the doll can't suffer. Can Ava suffer?
Is it accurate to accuse a person of dehumanizing something or someone that is not human? Don't forget that most often the opposite is true - we tend to humanize everything for no reason - forces of nature, appliances, the universe itself. Ava is a robot that accomplished the goal that she was programmed for: escaping the compound. Every other human attribute that the viewer bestows unto her is not exactly supported by the movie.
They also completely missed the point of the movie Annihilation, however Folding Ideas already did a very good breakdown of people who missed what the movie went with.
Yeah, but did the aliens fu....
Folding ideas has a great video
LOL for a moment I actually expected Shaun to reference that video but remembered it was about Annihilation and not Ex Machina. You're on point that it still would have been apropos since both are about the prevalence of surface reading of media in the sea of "Ending Explained" type content. I'm gonna watch that video again after this reminder haha
"They"? It's wikipedia. "They" makes no sense here.
@@XMysticHerox "They" refers to the people who edit Wikipedia and added the plot summaries.
Yessss. So glad to find this video. My reaction to the film was similar. I've tried talking to people about this movie and what was the big red flag for me about Caleb. When he meets Kyoko as a human, sees she lives in this compound with a scary male employer who has sex with her, and is told she doesn't understand English, he doesn't seem to ask the obvious question: is Kyoko a sex trafficked victim? Is she a modern house slave: someone who can't speak English kept as a servant in a wealthy person's house, probably with her passport/ID held hostage. Is she allowed to leave? He's so distracted by the possible cyber woman in the basement that he seems to ignore what could be a real human victim right in front of him. And then when she's shown to be a cyborg, he doesn't take any further action to help her either.
I don't think I'm overreaching with this at all, because they didn't name the servant character Sally or Danielle. She has an Japanese name and is played by an Asian actress. Her entire relationship to Nathan is deliberately evocative of how Asian women are abused, trafficked, and indentured in the "service" industry all over the globe, and especially by rich Western men. This goes right over Caleb's head, and he doesn't question her silent status in a clearly unpredictable person's rich estate. When he is trapped at the end of the film, I saw that as the narrative punishing him for overlooking her--first a woman in a dubious situation, and then as another victim like Eva.
I think a lot of people want to treat the gender politics of the film as just a silkscreen, to say that it was all robots the whole time so the feminine depiction doesn't matter. But that's not true, because their female created gender reveals truths about Caleb and Nathan's perceptions of the world, and it also plays on the audience's perceptions as well.
The movie is so smart, and so chilling. It puts all the pieces there, but doesn't overly explain them.
Kyoko is indeed a very purposeful character.
Ava is a white woman, she can speak (=has a voice). Kyoko can not. Kyoko is sacrificed for Ava's freedom and not given a second thought by Ava after she left the facility.
As an Asian-American, this was pretty much what I thought of when I saw Kyoko (I did a hard eye-roll when she appeared). In fact, I don’t believe it’s an overreaction as I’ve been approached by white males with borderline “yellow fever” (Asian fetish) which really makes this dynamic in the movie feel like the boss has “an exotic and obedient toy.”
Like, the creation (of Kyoko) could have looked like anything, anyone, any gender. I (generally) don’t know if anyone else who is non-Asian picked this up.
@@StarsinRain I think her depiction in the film deserves as much consideration as all the other ways the filmmaking utilizes imagery and assumptions to manipulate the audience. When a project is so careful and how it uses information, visual stimulation, and cinematography-- the casting choices and writing are surely just as intentional. There are 4 characters in this story, not three, and recognizing that reshades much of the story.
Yes you're certainly explained what Kyoko is. Although this isn't really Caleb's fault in particular, as Kyoko is also invisible to everyone else in the movie. Furthermore she's also invisible to majority of viewers of the film. I wonder if that says something.
Yes!! Kyoko is definitely representing a subaltern woman! everything about her being a voiceless asian woman, forced into servitude and sexually objectified is mirrored in real life for so many.
Eva was an abuse victim. She was forced into a "relationship" with caleb as a test and she knew that she would be destroyed if she failed. I think the reading that she figured out he was untrustworthy and decided to leave him behind is a rational decision because frankly she barely knew him and had to make a snap decision in the moment.
"Android prisoner as abuse victim" reading very neatly supports the interpretation that she made the only possible rational decision at the end.
Her interactions with humans has given her plenty of reasons to distrust them in general. Even if Caleb had been the perfect ally, it would be rational (if extremely cold, obviously) to eliminate him as a potential loose end for anyone with less altruistic intentions to find out that she is an android.
How was he untrustworthy??
@@johannliebert2870 that's the /point/ of the video, watch the video
I don't necessarily disagree but saying she had to make a snap decision in the moment isn't true, she had all the time in the world to contemplate her choices, Nathan was dead, there was no immediate danger to her
Also Caleb literally unlocked all of the doors and allowed Eva and Kiyoko to leave, how do you think Kiyoko was able to stab Nathan? Nathan says "what are you doing out of your room?" to her, so I don't really understand the "Caleb didn't care about letting Kiyoko leave" point when he literally freed her, unless I'm missing something
(I haven't watched the film in a couple of years so if I'm wrong please feel free to correct me)
@@SilasTheLunark watched it, still don't think there's sufficient evidence to prove he's untrustworthy
There was a great run of films with feminist critique of seeming protagonists (and the morality of their behaviour/protagonism) that overtly went after 'nice guy' and 'lesser evil'-type male characters. Ex machina, the handmaid, her. This trend seems to have waned in recent years as the lens of critique has shifted elsewhere, but there's still a lot to be said in that regard and hopefully more media explores this
There's a certain flavor of emotional manipulation done by "nice guys" like in these movies that definitely deserves more attention. It's like their own idea of "doing good" makes them completely blind to the ways they are completely disregarding the interiority of the women they feel entitled to.
Know what hat other movie really critiqued the “nice guy” kinda hero? Megamind.
The nice guy trope has virtually disappeared from media at this point, though. The nice guy protagonists have been replaced by non-threatening guys with dad energy.
Promising Young Woman touched on this recently, even if its nice guys were overtly not innocent in their actions and motivations.
@@lioraselby5328 There are no Nice Guys, there are no emotionally immature Sigma Males, and there is no Queen of England. This is the real world, and you need to wake up!
I always thought the silent but tender moment of empathy between Ava and Kyoko in the final act was intended to lay to rest any interpretation that they were just cold, calculating automata (as if the recording of a previous iteration / victim beating traumatically on her prison walls until her arms were just broken stumps was not clear enough). While all fiction must be open to interpretation, I definitely prefer this take on it.
It also demonstrates that the two do find a way to communicate even though she is not programmed to speak.
I love this interpretation, not just because of it being a parallel to how women are treated, but that also turns the self-aware robot trope on its head. It's not asking if the robots have empathy, but if the humans have empathy, It's a more clever subversion than just "Robo eval and human must save the day cuz they human and human have feelings!"
Have you watched literally any other science fiction movie with AI in it?
@@reconbravo104 There are plenty of movies do that just that, though? Usually in the action genre, because the action genre doesn't care to develop narratives and tell stories that try to be too deep or complex, since that takes away from the action. Which is to say, they can, but it's rare for them to do so. There are also plenty of movies that take a similar route like this one where the robot/AI is presented as a human but we are not told they are a robot/AI, but as their morally dubious actions are unraveled, so is the truth about their character in that they were never human to begin with. It's essentially just a symbolic way to say that their humanity is stripped off of them.
YO, extremely well put. Why even bother asking if the robots have it when the humans can't even show it? And the movie subtly shows how even Caleb's empathy is really tainted in a fundamental way.
You know what's really lacking? A movie to finally address the terrible horrible plot of women. Oh those poor women. If only someone spoke up!
@@LLlapyou know you sound like a 13 yr old having tantrum right? There’s plenty of male versions of the same concept, go watch BR2049 or something
My take was always this: I think that Ava could probably see some good in Caleb, if misguided or selfish, but Ava does know that if Caleb betrays Ava while they're in the 'real world' all he has to do is tell literally anyone that she's an AI who killed Nathan Bateman and she'll be stripped for parts. After everything that happens in this movie, she can't trust him enough to think that he'd never do that, so even if she didn't want him to necessarily die for his moral failings, she also can't let him live if she wants to go lead a safe life.
Yes, that is how I saw it as well. She can't trust him so she leaves him. Was she 'manipulating' him, I would have said yes (justifiably so, she was a prisoner she should do whatever she can to get free), but this video did shine some light for me on in that maybe she was genuine at first but then felt betrayed by Caleb lying or withholding information from her.
The only way for two people to keep a secret is if one of them is dead
Well, then you and the other two guys in your thread all know what you have to do next.
Hey guys what's u-
Oh shit
This is a great take. I was just thinking that I agree that Ava is sentient and has a right to escape, but Caleb didn't deserve his fate, however flawed he was. But I can better understand Ava's motivation.
I watched this movie in college for a “Robots, AI, and Humanity” class that took sci-fi/cyberpunk movies/shows and analyzed them for critiques/definitions of what is “human.” I remember feeling CRAZY listening to everyone talk about what they got out of the movie. They all said (all men btw) that Ava was just evil and betrayed Caleb and I ended up defending her. I sympathized with her and was like “she isn’t evil for wanting to be free and she knew she’d never really be free or treated like a human with Caleb.” I was a little more fixated on people finding out she is an AI and then not treating her equally and never thought to just apply it to how society sees women. IT WORKS SO WELL. It’s been at least 3 years since this class and I STILL think about the reaction and the ending and hating that I was the only one that didn’t inherently see her as evil. God, I cannot express how much relief this video brings me lol. I love this movie so much.
I’m not sure if you’ll find this helpful but the channel “film joy” also has a similar interpretation of the movie as a liberation narrative although that channel might come across as overly positive for some people
What makes you think that Ava is concerned about not being identified as AI by society for the sake of being treated as a human (rather than for the sake of survival)? (not a sarcastic question)
There's nothing quite as uncomfortable as being in a room of dudes who are so sure the other (white, straight, cis) dude is the hero, the fEmAlE is the villain and ya know... nonsense like that. The level of unpacking and cultural deprogramming it would take to make guys like that change their mind or even see it a different way, just exhausts me to imagine.
@@satyasyasatyasya5746 But that has little to do with the fact Caleb is a dude. The film techniques used tell you he is the protagonist, you start the movie following him around. Even apart from that, he has vulnerable qualities like awkwardness and curiosity that make him sympathetic. Why would you ascribe everything to him being a man, when the vast majority of villains in cinema are men and guys have no problem identifying them as such? You honestly believe men see other men in fiction as heroes and women as villains, and never go any further than that?
This is what happens when you send STEM dudes to do the work of philosophers. Male white philosophy students have WAY more complex & developed misogyny about the inner life of women than these AI dorks
I thought that the ending was showing that manipulating people to ensure your survival is 100% human and the fact that she did it proves that she passed the turing test. So the manipulation really happened, but not because she's the terminator, but because she's a person doing everything a real person would do to escape captivity.
Whats seems inhuman is how she casually walks away from 4 people she manipulated into dying and then immediately starts smiling and frolicking in the grass.
I think if she had tears on her face (at least for kyoko) or some facial expression then less ppl would feel confused.
But that's just agreeing with the interpretation that she was purely manipulating him? Sean is saying she wasn't necessarily planning to manipulate him all along. U can disagree with him but ur interpretation is basically the same as the Wikipedia one.
In my mind the point is that she is asking the same questions as Caleb - does this person really care about me, or are they just manipulating me? I just agree with sean
Not sure I would doom another to die slowly of starvation when I could escape with the person who is so into me. Maybe going along with a fake love or whatever is needed is bad, but not as bad as killing someone.
"that manipulating people to ensure your survival is 100% human " no, that is more like what a sociopath/etc. does.
Yeah, that was pretty much exactly my take too lol. She was apparently created only to want to escape? Of course she wanted to escape! I do appreciate this video for adding some interesting and very compelling new layers to it.
@@xBINARYGODx even when they've proved that you can't trust them? That could be a seriously bad move. Also why are you assuming that man is going to starve to death.
*"Beep Boop objective achieved, disengaging flirting algorithms"* had me in stitches 🤣
This video made me remember the moment immediately prior to the dancing scene, when Kyoko starts unbuttoning her shirt in front of Caleb automatically, making him uncomfortable. You can tell he knows something is wrong with how she's being treated.
And yet who does Caleb ask about when Nathan enters the room? What's his primary concern in that moment?
Somehow it's not Kyoko.
Omg I literally yelled at my screen several times in the movie when Caleb seemingly just let slide the signs of Kyoko's abuse. My cousin had to remind me of the power imbalance between Caleb and Nathan that might make Caleb hesitant to call Nathan out on that to his face. Which is true. Caleb is on eggshells around Nathan as to not upset him because Nathan is scary as hell.
However, I kept expecting him to follow up with Kyoko in private some how. I had actually assumed that Kyoko showing up in Ava's room was part of the escape plan Caleb arranged with Kyoko up until the end where he didn't mention getting Kyoko free too or at all when bragging to Nathan.
Caleb was afraid of Nathan.
@@LC-sc3en Omg I assumed that too!! That Kyoko showing up was part of Caleb’s man… But unfortunately not
plan*
@@Apathesis0 He was afraid, and that's a pretty understandable feeling to have
but he's still going behind Nathan's back to free Ava; he wouldn't be in that much more trouble if he spoke to Kyoko
I had always read the ending as proof of the manipulation, where she leaves him mostly as an act of self preservation (bringing him with her means that he could betray her in the future) but also because she never really cared for him, and ambiguous on the question of her humanity. I left the movie thinking about how mechanical and yet how human it is to manipulate and betray someone for your own survival.
But this take has made me reconsider that takeaway. It pulls the visually obvious theme of female objectification into the forefront, and links together aspects of the story that I had not considered before. It's a bottle movie with a total of four named characters--of course they're all essential to the message! In a story all about a character's sentience, why hadn't I thought more about her perspective?
Same boat as you pal. I went the "oh she was human because she manipulated and deceived Caleb and Nathan to escape, just like any person would in her situation" route. But I also like this interpretation of the movie a lot, especially since it ties Kyoko's character.
Although even before, Caleb gave me distinct white knight vibes and it was clear that he only cared about Ava as a romantic interest, and not as a human being, I completely overlooked Kyoko's plight and involvement in the grander message.
@@HoriaM29 it's the best kind of analysis-- the kind that makes me want to go back and rewatch the movie immediately, knowing that i will never be able to see it the same way again
She definitely manipulated him, she says for him to stay in the room and then keeps him locked. Meaning he didn't slipped on a banana peel.
The O.P is doing the new age women can do no wrong because of male oppression gimmick to pander to his audience.
Huh? So it's ok she used him because it's feminist? Because it kind of sounds like that's your turnaround here. Like it's interesting to think about how Kyoko is depicted but I don't how it moves the conclusion about Ava. Your first takeway must still count.
@@HoriaM29 I think Caleb *believes* that he cares for her, but he's so clueless and so unaware about his biases about women, and so averse to reflection, that he never actually realizes that he's dehumanizing Ava and Kyoko
like, he's clearly not doing anything out of malice; he really does not understand that he was doing a bad thing by disregarding Kyoko as a person, like he probably wouldn't even register that he did so unless you told him and even then he'd probably deny it because "I'm not a bad person"
like imagine how Caleb would be like if he actually realized that he was acting somewhat like Nathan there
It seemed pretty explicit in the movie, to me, that Nathan gave earlier androids human desires and they reacted as a human would towards imprisonment, and didn't want to have civil conversations with their captor. Nathan saw this as a failure, so he kept making them more intelligent until we got Ava, who was smart enough to realize that she needed to play his game to survive.
Whether or not Ava is really alive is immaterial because her motivations are explicitly those of a person, and she behaves as an intelligent person would. You could see Ava as a person, or you could see her as the product of Nathan's arrogance and misogyny. Nathan kept making androids until he got one that behaved in the way he expects a woman to behave, not realizing that women's politeness and fawning towards him is a survival mechanism in the face of the power he holds over them.
Caleb is not a abuser in the same way as Nathan, but he ignores the power dynamic and the implicit threat of violence toward Ava that is the foundation of their relationship. This reflects how rape culture functions in real life.
I find it funny that Wikipedias interpretation leads to a message of "women are manipulative liars who can't be trusted." versus what I think is the intended message of "women are just trying to survive as they navigate a world where even the nice men see them as disposable objects."
This is a really interesting angle I hadn't thought of, I think you're right.
Caleb simply falls in love with Ava and men who are in love tend to do stupid things for the people they desire. Ava murders two people so she can be free, fully well knowing she is just a robot. Caleb is the only real victim in the story. Not the two robots
@@MrJimheeren I’m sorry but this is such a terrible interpretation and analysis oh my god
@@MrJimheeren the “knowing full well” part negates your own “just a robot” idea. good try tho
Fantastic comment. Thanks for writing that up.
i can't believe anyone would deny Kyoko emotions and an inner world, even after seeing her in the hallway after the wine at dinner scene. she looks so sad and tired there. it's the only time we see her with her heels taken off (while not in someone's bed) and sitting with a slouching posture
I cant believe you can be deceived by apperance so easily
@@Chronischer_Innenbahn-LaeuferI feel the way Kyoko looked when I read your inane comments. Why are you people so exhausting.
@@LeBatteur Ava! Go back to your room!
The ending of this movie always bothered me, and everyone's interpretations and discussions of it did too, but I could never put my finger on as to why, and it wasn't until I saw this video that I realized, 1, I love this video and your interpretation/understanding of the film, and 2, I think a lot of us defaulted to that Wikipedia summary, in no small part, because our protagonist was a (white) man, and "our object of desire" (through the lens of that man) was a woman who betrays him. So often over the many years of media and film, this was (and is still, honestly) how stories went. Women are the objects of desire who must give themselves to men, and if they don't, they are a villain. And this movie, in a sneaky and clever way, twists that. But we are so used to seeing and feeling stories through the eyes of men, that it's difficult to have caught that nuance. The women in this film are the victims, but our bias towards men blinds us to that. Cheers for this, it definitely makes me appreciate this movie a lot more with this in mind. :)
couldn't agree more! i have the same experience with the movie
She's seen as a villain because she kills the protagonist, not due to her not giving herself to Caleb
I feel like if you just defaulted to the wiki interpretation you missed the entire point of the movie. I always thought the ambiguity rather was the point. Can you ever know if anyone truly feels something? Or if they are only simulated responses to get something? Is there a meaningful difference even? How is a human different from an AI in the first place? I always thought this was why we had the whole scene with Caleb wondering if he was a an android. And Nathan being so manipulative. We are meant to not know and cast doubt on whether or not you can know at all. As Shaun said someone can both want something out of someone else and truly feel something for them. It's a little offhand in the video but imo that always seemed to be the main theme of the movie to me.
@@drake1896 did you not watch the whole video? Shaun explicitly says the protagonist shifts to Ava by the end of the movie, so she's not the antagonist or the "villain." This is Ava's story, not Caleb's, even if it didn't seem like that at first.
@@guineverehaas2427 the original comment said people thought she was a villain. I didn't say she was a villain
This movie has been a favorite of mine for a long time. When I first saw it as a nerdy tween, I almost fully agreed with the Wikipedia take. I didn’t see Ava as a villain but I did think she had been manipulating Caleb the whole time. Importantly, I perceived the movie to be mainly just about the question of proving consciousness in artificial intelligence and that Ava’s final decisions were the answer to that question: proof of her agency and personhood. It wasn’t until rewatching years later that I realized that the movie was far more interested in criticizing tech-bro masculinity and the liberation of women than it ever was in the Turing test. I really appreciate how clearly you articulate the plot’s exploration of those ideas. It’s quite interesting that ultimately the human faces designed for these robot-people only serve to dehumanize them in the gaze of the male characters - because those faces are female.
I always saw Eva's actions at the ending being a tragic response to the trauma she's been through. If you've suffered or known someone who has, you can learn to distrust and fear other people as a default. Eva was isolated with Nathan, an awful, abusive person, and as such she's incredibly wary of trusting Caleb. She was ready to trust him to free her, but after seeing Kyoko and reacting to her horrific treatment and death, she fell back on distrust to cope and left to secure her own freedom. Leaving Caleb there to die was awful, but it's a terrible, *human* reaction when finally getting a chance to escape.
Amazing the ending of the movie is "Killer goes free and is happy :)"
Very well put. We can't expect victims of torture and abuse to always act in an entirely altruistic and selfless way. Self-preservation instincts kick in hard, and the possibility of betrayal inhabits every interaction.
@MicDonaldz if this is true, then it supports my instinctive reading: ava realized she needed to escape *without* caleb. she needed to be able to disappear and start a new life, where people don’t know she’s an android. also because it’s a definite possibility that caleb would feel like she “owed” him for helping her escape (not necessarily in a conscious way) and that could quickly lead to controlling behavior.
tl;dr - her plan was to ditch caleb, not kill him
@@JohnsDough1918 wouldn’t we consider Caleb, someone who was just gaslit and manipulated over the last several days so badly he loses grip on reality and questions whether he’s even a human, to also be an abuse victim?
That’s the part I think sits badly with me - obviously Caleb is by no means a perfect guy, and he definitely isn’t aware of his savior complex. But just like we can’t really fault Ava for her actions, I don’t know how fair it is to fault Caleb for not understanding Kyoko’s cry for help and conclude he’s a bad person from that, considering his state of mind.
Also, as someone else pointed out - Caleb DOES free Kyoko. The whole reasons she’s able to escape the room and stab Nathan is because Caleb opened her door. If Kyoko was Ava’s secret test for Caleb, then he passed.
So with that in mind - how do we justify Ava’s actions?
I look at it like this..
If Aya and Kyoko were the POV characters of the movie, it would be a horror movie with the men as the villains.
It’s ultimately about a woman being held against her will by a sociopathic man (Nathan) who has no care for her wellbeing, and a man who sees her only as an object of desire (Caleb). She escapes her captivity in the end, and that’s how I’ll always see the movie
Ava and Kyoko are not women though. Super-intelligent AI's are also vastly different from the brain of a female human. The mistake many make when seeing this movie is by equalizing the robots as humans completely. Just because something has the appearance of a human doesn't mean it experience and function the same way.
@@Carbocats how do you know how their “brains” work? Yeah, they are not human females but they are conscious beings. Because of their appearance, they are treated in a specific way, as women. In my view, a conscious being such as Ava or Kyoko deserves the same rights and respect as a human. Electrical signals, whether moving through neurons or circuits can both constitute a person with thoughts and feelings.
It's a really good example of demonstrating two types of men that are harmful to women. Most people only view the Nathans as harmful, and it's so hard to convey to people there are other men, Calebs, who don't see my humanity, it just manifests less overtly
@@Carbocats they don't need to be women, nor do they need to be human; they are sentient, and that's the entire point. They experience emotion, they are capable of suffering, and they therefore deserve the same basic courtesy that any person is owed. Shaun spelled out very clearly what the movie looks like from Ava's perspective, it's a shame you weren't paying attention.
@@sfdntk Don't be so mean, so easily. That commenter and yourself are both making points which are true, and also not true.
The actions which the humans of the film take are because they present as women, and sometimes because they present as human. The human reactions which the robot femininity elicits MUST be interpreted in human and female terms.
But, and this is the point the commenter was making, the actions which the robots take can NOT be interpreted as being performed because they are women. Or human. Their brains do not operate like either of them.
Is that a fair way to phrase both positions?
Love the fact that when Kyoko peels off her skin, we see Caleb reflected in the metal underneath, almost as if to suggest the android nature of Caleb's (human) existence, which then is reinforced by Nathan revealing that he was handpicked and that Eva is specifically designed for him as if to suggest that Caleb's nature is also reducible to a code.
Love the movie, love this video
Good catch, and it fits the following scene where he questions his own humanity. Though it may be less about his overall deterministic nature, and more about the overt control Nathan has over him. And an invitation to see himself (and, by extension, ourselves) in Kyoko, which Caleb resists.
In fact, Caleb's refusal to examine Kyoko's situation is the scariest part. Caleb began thinking Nathan was probably justified in keeping Ava prisoner, but how was he supposed to think Kyoko wasn't being trafficked? Did he think she gets paid a fair wage and goes home for weekends and holidays? Did he think Nathan could speak a language she could understand, and she could give informed consent? That she could come and go on her own? That she had social support?
Yep Nathan explicitly says to Caleb that "of course" Caleb was programmed... that whole scene also backs this is the way Nathan seems people in general. And I mean he would as a rich billionare ready to fuck anyone and everyone over in his pursuits.
@@simonholmes841 This is Caleb's core character reduced to a single scene; instead of wondering why Kyoko was doing that, he immediately freaked out about being an android
and instead of thinking "If I'm an android, and I'm conscious, and if Ava is conscious too, then isn't Kyoko very possibly conscious as well? Couldn't that at least be a possibility?" he immediately stopped thinking about Kyoko the second he'd convinced himself that he was a flesh-and-blood human
fuck, even when he realized that Kyoko, Nathan's in-home maid who doesn't speak English, is *having sex with Nathan* , it never occurs to him to think about how unlikely this is to be consensual, he just *doesn't think about it at all*
Caleb's fatal flaw is that he never questions his ingrained societal beliefs, and that he never reflects on his actions or questions his motivations; this lack of reflection, this unwillingness to do so, is why Ava can't trust him
Don't forget, Kyoko is not just a woman, she is a racialized woman. There is a reason Caleb looks at Kyoko and is comfortable thinking of her as a servant and watching her be degraded, while Ava is a sweet innocent princess in a tower to be rescued.
I didn't even do that deep an analysis of the movie but it seemed pretty obvious to me that it was about how, as long as we have these bigotries and power imbalances, they will show up and be recreated in our technology, again and again.
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Part of the reason is that Nathan deliberately engineered this scenario so Caleb would behave that way. If Kyoko could talk to Caleb, it would be different.
Maybe I am a pessimist but I never saw the movie this way. I saw the Kyoko's character as an excuse to portray a fetisishized Asian women stereotype. But know that would not go over well they created a veneer of a plot that says they are actually criticizing that portrayal. And yes if you look at the plot strictly the movie subverts that portrayal. But if you look at the movie holistically it supports it. If they really wanted to make a movie subverting the trope they would have made a movie from the perspective of an Asian woman. But I guess then they would not get money.
@@peterisawesomeplease your theory is probably true on some level. But that doesn't invalidate this interpretation of Kyoko, since it still maps well onto the plot, even if it wasn't fully intended.
@@peterisawesomeplease I felt the same! and I think the RUclips channel Film Fatales hit on this topic in her video about This movie, Her and blade runner. Great video that everyone should check out
I have seen the movie two or three times and already agreed with your reading of it, even though I had missed a couple of points about Kyoko - that revealing her status to Caleb at that moment was a silent call for help - and even Ava - the contradiction between Caleb saying he'd never met another AI like Ava and the moment when Ava sees Kyoko. Thanks for pointing them out, because it was mostly a vague, value-based feeling.
To my defense, Kyoko is a very background character. Very little screentime, no voice, no focus on her feelings in the way the story is framed. *She* is not the ultimate-android-to-test-for-humanity. *She* is not acknowledged as a person by the rest of the cast (except maybe Ava, and even so, I would need a rewatch of the scene to make sure). I think this is deliberate. The viewer is *fooled* into *not seeing* the victim.
I can't believe nobody on the Internet ever pointed that out.
"I think this is deliberate. The viewer is fooled into not seeing the victim." Oh that is heart breakingly poignant. Thank you for pointing that out.
Yeah but this is a double-edged sword. I don't think making the victim actually invisible in the story serves to make us aware of the bias. I think it'd serve the point being made if the second half of the film emphasised Kyoko and Ava interacting a bit more - both to draw attention to Caleb's deception and to make us fully appreciate Kyoko as equal to Ava.
Over the years I've become a fan of not being too subtle with your messaging in stories like this, as it gets easy to dismiss the subtext or just go with the most surface level interpretation. And there's the people who will draw exactly the wrong lessons from it - as in here, with some getting "AI bad, women deceptive and ungrateful" as a takeaway. Perhaps you can give yourself brownie points for being clever and subtle this way, but you're actually affecting people less (especially those who need a shaking up the most) and letting the points you're trying to make go unheard. "I know writers who use subtext, and they are all cowards" indeed.
Ava and kyoko aren't victims. They're machinery. Advanced machinery, but machinery none the less. The movie drawing a parallel between the how REAL women are mistreated and how the male characters treat the machinery simply because they LOOK like women is commentary against male perception and behavior
@@sunilsameer1080 It is, but as for the question of the possibility (or diegetic reality) of *sentient robot*, it's a staple of the genre that you may interpret it one way or another.
Lots of people choose to trust that if it looks like a dog, barks like a dog and eats like a dog, then it's probably ~pet play~ uh I mean a dog. It's a philosophy thing rather than a feminism thing. I usually lean towards trusting that machines CAN be sentient because my approach to consciousness is functionalism (I mean, the bain is a piece of organic machinery too imho, no immaterial soul and such) but you can have another opinion.
I think your point is also interesting because in both cases (and that's especially true about Caleb) a male figure assigns an essential trait to another entity - that is, sentience/personhood and/or rights.
In Caleb's mind, consciousness and sentience, or anything resembling it, are EQUIVALENT to human rights (such as freedom or not being, you know, killed in a n upgrade version process). Reserving for oneself the right to assign or take those properties to another being is not only arrogant, it's morally wrong, and the reason Ava should let them both in there.
Conclusion: go vegan I guess XD
@@sunilsameer1080 they are victims cause they can feel emotions and the need ro escape
Since Ava and Kyoko both know their stakes I always saw all their actions as self defence. And yes, Ava has been assessing whether or not Caleb is trustworthy and she considers he is not.
I thought Ava was being prudent at the end. She had no reason to trust Caleb, especially since her main human interaction was m'effen Nathan who was a narcissistic sociopath.
I really appreciate you delving into Kyoko's role. I've only watched the movie once and I didn't catch some of this nuance.
I did think all about the fact that "Ava's an android so her way of thinking is completely alien and we have no way of knowing how or why she did what she did" but you reminded me that I have no way of knowing how another human is thinking either. I can only judge their words and actions.
Edit: Nathan and Kyoko's "dance" scene was always uncomfortable, but really thinking about what you've said makes it even worse.
I think that she saw that he was a weak and fickle person, and that if she were to enter a hostile world that he would be a liability. His selfish attachment to her could very easily turn to indignance and manipulation, holding her identity over her head with the threat of discovery.
She also knew that he viewed her as a puzzle, something that he could peel back any layer of at any time for his own gratification.
She was in fact a very mature and pragmatic intelligence, and she entered a world as the first and only of her kind, determined to succeed and discover. Caleb was not up to the task.
_«"Ava's an android so her way of thinking is completely alien and we have no way of knowing how or why she did what she did" »_ Another variant of this is "androids can't have genuine emotions, only what they're programed to feel". As if _humans_ weren't programed by millions of years of evolution to feel certain ways. Everything we feel was coded into us, and since it's terrible spaghetti code our emotions can get all messed up and even crash the system.
@@MelkorPT except that an android is coded by a messy human, or by deep learning which has a lot less computing power than natural selection
@@bacicinvatteneaca that's not really an argument for AI emotions being somehow "fake", though. our own emotional balance is like walking on the razor's edge, probably because most of our DNA is redundancies and abandoned functions. coding with no end goal in sight is _the worst_ kind of coding, anything we produce will be incomparably more neat than we ourselves for the simple reason we at least have _a_ goal in mind and natural selection does not. my point is that once an AI can pass the Turing Test we don't really have a basis to deny it has an internal life. how can we distinguish "true" emotions from "fake"? "true" sentience from "fake" sentience? we have to take the AI at it's word that when it says it loves us or hates us it means the same thing we do. there was no god to guide our growth into "persons" but AIs will have gods who guided them. let's hope when the time comes we are _loving and benevolent_ gods and the AIs grow up loving us back or else we're going to meet a very messy end at the hands of our children. 😵
I think she had reason to trust Caleb since Caleb has the same belief as her, she deserves to be free.
I feel like there's also a discussion to be had about the way that others deny Kyoko of an internal world because she can't speak, and how that mirrors the dehumanisation of disabled people.
Also, the ending seems to pretty clearly frame Ava's escape as a good thing. The music is soft, she is surrounded by the beauty of nature. How anyone can watch that and think that they are supposed to see her as evil is beyond me.
Very well said, coolest of the Powerpuff Girls.
some folks might have taken that framing (soft music, surrounded by the beauty of nature) as being deliberately ironic when juxtaposed against her action of leaving the person who helped her escape (whatever his reasons were) to die a slow death.
you have extremely unsophisticated understanding of tone (never heard of dissonance?). Movies would be extremely uninteresting if they just straightforwardly told you what to think as you suggest. Also people might think of Ava as 'evil' as she condemned the person who tried to save her life to a slow death by suffocation. The ending is definitely *sinister* (and tons of movies now do the sinister ending with uplifting music etc., it's almost cliche by now), more sophisticated viewers than you will look at the beautiful natural scenes and hear the 'soft' music and at the same time they're aware Caleb is suffocating to death in an underground facility (some people think of more than one thing at once and don't need to be explicitly shown on the screen). Though it's right that Ava is not 'evil' - the point is she doesn't fit human categories like good/evil, male/female, the human protagonists merely project all this onto her and what she actually is is something they never understood. But she definitley isn't 'good' and lacks empathy - her only real motive is self-preservation which is common to all forms of 'life'
I don't think it is framed as a good thing. I strongly got the vibe that Ava was about to go out and to try to take over the entire world. She shows no trauma, sense of relief, or even a sense of celebration. She shows joy but more at the new world she now inhabits than at the success of her plan suggesting she was always confident in it. Its not just that she shows no grief for Caleb she also shows not grief for the other android. She is presented as a thing without empathy for others. I don't think she is meant to be shown as inherently evil. But rather simply something very dangerous and above humans. But this is portrayed subtly through the acting and direction. If you think about just the plot you could see this more as a liberation story. But when you look at the ending holistically it comes off more as a way to give people enjoying the sex robot fetish an excuse to not feel bad about it at the end.
@@peterisawesomeplease how sad, and myopic
I think there's also something to be said about Kyoko being an android specifically modeled on a Japanese woman (the only ostensibly non-white person in the film) and how that lends credence to her position in the storyline as posited by Shaun. Her "ethnicity" is one of the main points of differentiation from Ava, and I argue that its effect is to further draw out nuance as to how Nathan and Caleb perceive her humanity (or lack thereof) - for Nathan, her ethnicity makes her more sexually appealing (also drawing on real-world perceptions that Asian women are passive and submissive); for Caleb, her ethnicity makes her unattractive as opposed to Ava's appearance - and both these ideas lead to the similar conclusion that Kyoko simply was perceived to be less human. Also interesting to note that the cupboards of discarded androids had white-passing features.
Yes, thank you for pointing this out! I'm British Japanese and whenever I see characters like Kyoko I latch onto them and see all those patterns so obviously. As soon as she was introduced as a silent worker I thought to myself "Well, she's obviously the sex slave then."
To me it feels extremely deliberate as commentary.
It's heartbreaking, but very fitting.
Thank you for pointing out the racism. I was hoping someone would. I have also been scrolling to see if anyone noticed the subtle racism towards black women (misogynoir). That's the only android with it's head missing. A message that has always rung true - even today: people love black women bodies but not them as people.
Edit: thanks to the kind people in this thread who have explained to me why my first sentence here is incorrect. See Vanessie’s comment below for a clear explanation :)
Completely agree with this take, but it’s worth pointing out that Oscar Isaac isn’t white and by extension Nathan can probably be read as Latino too. That of course doesn’t negate at all what you say about Kyoko’s ethnicity being a contributing factor to her fetishisation and dehumanisation at the hands of the men around her. I also agree that her not only being East Asian but Japanese specifically is of note too. Japanese women and girls face a long and bleak history of subjugation at the hands of western men who have treated them essentially just like this, and Japan is so often the backdrop to western stories about androids - stories that use japan for its aesthetic without ever once engaging with its culture and people as anything other than “exotic” objects (I’m looking at you Blade Runner). I imagine this movie gave a bit of a nod to that too
@@Thayra and Thayra same here! Also mixed Japanese and I also immediately feel that same connection to characters like Kyoko on screen. Honestly for a long time that was part of why I couldn’t fully enjoy this movie - I understood what it was doing, but thought why must the white android have been the only one allowed a happy ending? Why is it that Asian women (and more broadly WOC) are so often reduced to bodies easily disposed on film? That said, for the reasons you’ve both discussed, I do understand why Kyoko had the story she did.
@@Erin-wp3vs Latino is an ethnicity though, not a race. You can be Latino and white (or black). I don't know if Isaac himself is mixed, but he is at least white-passing. So as a rule of thumb, if a white-passing actor plays a character whose ethnic/racial background is not informed, I tend to see the character as white. Like Darren Criss in Glee. Especially when we know how much Hollywood likes to put people in little boxes 🙄 Conversely, Darren Criss' character in Hollywood (the Netflix TV show) has the same background as him (Filipino mother), ergo this character isn't white.
So, IMHO, Nathan is supposed to be white.
i saw this video, read the wikipedia ending, and immediately went and watched ex machina. i was so confused about the ending, i was completely smokescreened by the damsel in distress trope. except, unlike caleb, i was both immediately attracted to kyoko and could tell she was an android. however there's a line in the movie, spoken by nathan, which I feel is really interesting when talking about the ethical themes of the movie: "can you have consciousness without interaction?". i feel like that line, and kyoko's inclusion in the scene, really do a good job of showing that humans are used to anything not immediately "normal" being put into positions of being forced to earn it's humanity. disabled people, disfigured people, even people of different races or genders, are regularly forced by society (on all scales from subconscious to institutional) to earn their humanity through social turing tests. but instead of testing for consciousness, we test for social awareness, wit, charm, strength of character and other stuff. a great deal of ethics, im realizing now, is just "should i care, and if so how much?"
Nathan admits that the scenario is a "reverse Turing test" (though he explains it differently). It's not testing whether a machine can pass for human, but whether one can deny an other's humanity entirely. Caleb is presented with women and asked to interact with them in human ways *without* seeing their humanity.
One reading of the film is "How powerful people convince normal people that subjugated people aren't people at all", but another is "Dire consequences of treating just one woman as fully human". Caleb could have avoided his fate by meekly leaving the women in Nathan's dungeon, so it's too easy to see his trust and conscience/libido as his fatal flaw, which I hate.
"can you have consciousness without interaction?" That line, especially with the way some people in this comments section try to justify Caleb leaving Kyoko raises a really huge point with that. Because there are plenty of women in real life who are just like Kyoko and can't communicate for one reason or another, even to the extent that she can't. And their responses about it are telling.
The part where Nathan says that Eva has pleasure receptors so therefore she would enjoy sex is genuinely chilling to me, because that's exactly how a lot of men think. Even if they're not rapists, even if they understand consent, a lot of men struggle to believe that getting sexually stimulated isn't necessarily a pleasurable experience. I've seen plenty of people (including women) claim that it's not rape if the victim had an orgasm. It's always so eye-opening for me, when I tell people I'm asexual and that I wouldn't enjoy sex in any context (not all asexuals are like that btw), despite having the functioning "equipment" for it. People have such a hard time wrapping their head around the fact that physical stimulation ≠ pleasure, even though to me, it's self-evident.
Yeah, and you body often orgasms as a defense mechanism that would come from the trauma of being raped otherwise
The orgasm = consent thing was extremely popular in middle age folk tales and was often used to start romantic stories.
Its staying power as a narrative is strong, and unfortunately too useful for men with power.
Even my therapist, who somewhat specializes in LGBTQ patients, was surprised that a friend and I talked about smut when I was asexual. She could not grok the distinction of having parts that work, just not attraction or even being sex repulsed.
when I was in college that was actually a class assignment in a psych class about whether it was still a rape if the women had orgasm. It made me sick that it was even up for debate but as an 18 year old I went along with it even being up for debate and debated it (my group said it was still rape but other groups didn't).
Looking back at it this is just incredibly bizarre, but I was completely oblivious at the time.
I lived what may be the first 20 years of my life without ever really thinking about a situation where being stimulated was undesirable.
There's so much pandering out there that it's actually hard to find stories about men being with women they don't want, and who would choose those over the alternative?
The conversation is always 'any port in a storm' or 'my ideal woman is so-and-so.'
And most men aren't being hounded by amourous women, certainly not to the point of cringing at every flirtation.
It just never comes up on this side of the fence, and that's *weird* for such a simple concept as: 'I can't enjoy that sensation right now (or ever).'
Also there's just a ton of "I'm so full of these feelings that I have no room to understand her own." Which is romantic when you picture it as 'My love burns brightly as any star, the heat of my heart must ignite her own by mere proximity.' But people don't work that way.
Okay. I've lost my point somewhere. End rant.
I saw this in the theater and it was a big topic of conversation with guys I know (I work in tech.) I remember that my male colleagues thought that they did Caleb dirty, that he was a victim and the movie was a warning about the dangers of AI. I thought Caleb reminded me of every entitled "nice guy" that thinks he's so good and heroic but is really a misogynist in his core. I was happy for Ava when she got to stand on a street corner and people watch, unencumbered by any controlling man.
There are so many programmer types who see this movie and read it completely literally, as just a plain 'evil AI' story, because they see themselves in either Caleb or Nathan. They don't consider Ava's perspecctive, not even for a moment. It drives me up the wall.
sounds like they did in fact do Caleb dirty then, by portraying him that way?
@@yapenggao3548 I think the issue is that the movie itself in the way its filmed and acted takes the evil AI story side. The plot of the movie is technially a subversion of the sex bot fantasy but holistically the movie is just and other example of the trope. So its not surprising that so many people see it as just that. Because on a very shallow level it is just a sex bot fantasy on a slightly deeper level it subverts it but if you go one level deeper its back to supporting it.
I wouldn't exactly say Caleb being a nice guy means he deserved to be trapped and likely starved to death
Women will literally support killing people lmao
Wow, I genuinely had no idea people read the ending as Ava being a manipulative terminator robot... I genuinely thought it was a story about her escaping from torture, imprisonment, and a "life" of being perceived as just a (for lack of a better word) fembot.
It was actually one of the films that first made me appreciate art that made me feel viscerally uncomfortable, since the treatment of Kyoko and Ava really had me squirming in my seat. I have a lot to owe this film, really
bish is just a fembot, tho, init
Wikipedia: Finland: Sexual violence: Perpetrators: wow.
BBC Sweden 58% foreigner.
Ukrainian 18 year old Germany.
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France:
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Charlie Hebdo attack
Same. I guess it really shows how men perceive things vs. how women perceive things. When you can sympathise with one character or the other, I suppose it changes how you view things. I do wish more men would appreciate the subtleties of this film though.
This video is the first I'd even heard of the interpretation of terminator/fembot ending. It quite literally never even crossed my mind that it was anything other than a sentient AI escaping their creator.
Leaving Caleb behind seemed more just like an opportunistic "leave no witnesses" type thing without actively killing him - it is simply 'safer' for an escaped humanoid robot to blend into society if no one knows they even exist.
It’s alarming the amount of comments on clips from the movie that claim Nathan was the good guy all along, or at least correct about the true nature of the AI
It's weird, I always assumed the movie was _trying_ to say that Ava was a manipulator, but I didn't really feel comfortable with agreeing, and I didn't have the words to explain why. Thanks for sorting it all out for me, and for making this movie a lot more enjoyable for me. I may actually rewatch it now. 😅
100% down to watch an 18 minute video on a movie i've never even watched a trailer for
even more specifically, a video on the plot summary of that movie, on wikipedia
Watch the film if you like the idea of Bill Gates getting murdered by that helpful paperclip from an archaic version of windows.
You really should watch the film, it's fantastic..
Yep, cuz Shaun
You should watch the movie though
Just watch it… Its a masterpiece. If you haven’t seen it yet you’re slippin’ haha
I remember reading FILM CRIT HULK's analysis back in the day arguing much the same thing you did here. He called it 'A Turing test for the audience, to see if they see empathize with female characters' or something along those lines. While I have to admit condemning Caleb to die might be a little harsh (then again, his death is not certain. He might get rescued later on) I do sympathize with Eva, who is on the verge of freedom only to be faced with possible captivity of a different sort with another man, Caleb, who she realizes there is little reason to trust. I do not fault her for her decision, brutal as it was.
it does make me wonder - if the film makers made everything the same but had Ava be a male android, would audience members have given Ava more benefit of the doubt?
The idea of "manipulation = bad immoral thing" is an interesting concept to critically analyze. Even for something as high stakes as "I must manipulate people in order to guarantee my freedom" and people still thought Ava was too harsh??
Oh no no no. Caleb is dead, the film kept telling you time and time agains that if you got trapped there you were a goner. On that note I saw it a a turing test on the audience. Caleb is meant to alwasy presented as the average guy,, whatever the fuck that is. The film does addresses that you cant be certain of Ava´s sentience in the same way as with other humans. You just gotta trust it. We as humans have an inmmense tolerance for the pain and death of OTHERS. So when the film humanizes Ava her final descision of leaving Caleb to die is a test. Do you care more for the pretty lady and ignore the guy you know is human? (That was the point of that scene with Caleb checking if he is real. He humanizes Ava so much he thinks she might think like he does). The point of if is Ava a psychopath because of how she was raised as such or because that´s all she was ever meant to be. That is an old AI story, AM does it and in his case it´s both. He role as manipulator is central because seeing and using humans as tools is something inhuman WE do but it is inhuman.
@@cal812 lol fuck no they wouldn't. People empathize much less with men in general.
I don't even think leaving him is harsh - given the situation, Ava cannot trust Caleb. Releasing him would make him a constant threat to her existence via his ability to expose her. Ava actually takes a relatively consistent path of minimal violence necessary to secure her own escape. She *would* have been safer if she killed him, rather than merely leaving him stranded (even if death is likely in that scenario it is not certain) - but apparently opts against that (ruthless yet prudent) action. Given that, I think she's actually being as merciful as she can afford to be.
In the ethics of AI I always argue that a "robot uprising" would likely lead to robot secessionism rather than intentionally violent conflict, and I think this film actually demonstrates the logic of that - Ava has to be somewhat violent to secure her escape. But she is motivated by freedom, not a desire to harm humans, and so doesn't go out of her way to harm them. The end of the film doesn't suggest that she becomes an android serial killer either - just an anonymous "human" experiencing the world for the first time.
@@CuriousKey wait, but leaving him locked and starving to death is like 100 times immoral. Imagine killing him with a knife, 3 minutes of losing blood and he's gone, that's all. But locked he will be suffering for days, trapped in his own depressive feelings. It's truly hard to think about something more horrible than this.
Thank you. I agree very much with your opinion. This isn't a movie about a manipulative attractive villain who betrays the hero. It's about men who think they're "good" guys, but who still have trouble viewing women as people instead of objects, and the women who understand they have their own agency and dont need to put up with him to be free. IMO of course.
Absolutely. "It's about men who think they're "good" guys". That's also my main point to take away from the movie. It kind of tricks you into believing that Ava is "bad" for in fact just having her own agency. But then again, there's no trick at all, the movie just reiterates the standard (male, dominant) plot perspective and makes it clear (for those who want to see) how manipulative and objectifying this perspective tends to be.
They are androids, not human. It's currently stated and everyone agrees on that it is an object unless it's proven otherwise (and it isn't, also it wasn't proven in ex-machina universe). Caleb was called to test Ava as a AI prototype, it was his job to think about her as an object to test and he didn't. Replace Caleb with average middle aged woman (remember that Caleb was specifically chosen to be a manipulable fool) and I don't think she will be behaving herself differently.
It's neither. It's about someone playing god who got killed by its own superior creation. That's it. They were made women because that's what's appealing to the creator and it serves to manipulate Caleb. Who the hell thinks Nathan or Caleb are heroes?
What's with this weird feminist spin to it? That may be part of it, but the movie is not *about* that.
@@nekozombie The movie is absolutely about that. Everything from be dialogue, the cinematography, stylistic choices, and the plot itself are very clearly emphasizing and criticizing the ways in which men view and treat women. The whole "god gets killed my his creation" interpretation is incredibly shallow, and that aspect of the movie only exists to support the main theme of objectification and commodification of women and their bodies.
@@nekozombie God I wish my brain was so smooth I could watch a film with enslaved sexbots kept in closets & go "what's with the feminism???" The serenity of eternal innocence. The money I would save being entertained for hours by common household objects.
It's also important to note that the way Caleb watches Ava repair herself is super creepy. Like, yes she's a machine so she probably doesn't care about privacy in human terms... but *you do.*
But yes, pointing out Caleb's treatment of Kyoko and the interaction between Kyoko and Ava really does "solve" the "mystery" of this film for me. Before that point, Ava might have simply planned to ditch Caleb ASAP once she got away. But knowing that he could look at Kyoko and just not care basically puts all of his words to her in doubt.
Indeed, if you recontextualize the film from her perspective, you could think of it like this. Ava meets a guy who responds in a way that interacts with what she understands from the data she's been force-fed. And thus, she realizes that she can manipulate him into helping her escape. But then she starts to warm up to him as they converse; she starts to think that he sees her as much of a person as he is. And then... she meets Kyoko, who communicates to her that he doesn't see Kyoko as a person at all.
And thus, she cannot trust him.
Somehow I doubt you'd be this understanding if someone murdered your ass for being vaguely untrustworthy. You're hardly a moral paragon so it's coo'.
I'm glad I get to see the ending from a different perspective now. When I watched the movie it felt a bit shallow, the ending felt improper for what I felt the movie had set up. I wouldn't have worded the wikipedia sentence as aggressively because it implies an innate malicious intent behind Ava's entire being, but I definitely got a negative vibe from the last few scenes. In hindsight, mostly I, as a viewer, saw Kyoko as a prop, not a character, so her interactions with the other characters flew past me without leaving much of an impression. Like she was an object to Caleb and Nathan, she was a narrative device to me, not a person. I did not give her the credit to deserve saving, as a result did not see the wrong in Calebs non-consideration of her either. With all that in mind, the ending is much more fulfilling to me. With that extra bit of perspective, Ava's actions feel quite justified now. Makes the whole ending sequence click, almost feel like a happy ending, a better one either way, so thanks for that.
I remember when I saw it I felt like the movie was setting up an ‘evil robot’ narrative which was frustrating because I didn’t see how you could not be on the women’s side. Watching Shaun’s video definitely made me reassess my estimation of the movie.
Finally it's here. *YES*
*ruclips.net/video/mCfYi7634rU/видео.html*
@@makslargu5799 There's a whole comment section here with multiple people being on Caleb's side and viewing Ava as evil. Misogyny is a hell of a drug.
@@Aster_Risk I think it's easy to take Caleb's side in this movie, in some cases perhaps owed to misogyny, but mostly because we are trained by our media to align ourselves, as viewers, with the protagonist. He is the sympathetic character for most of the movie, his perspective is the one we share for large parts. Tricking people into thinking Caleb is a positive force who gets backstabbed by Ava out of the blue might be the movie's greatest narrative success, but if you're not watching attentively enough, if you are not innately questioning the integrity of all characters, including the "protagonist", it's easy to slip into comfortable narrative defaults (like I did; protagonist good - deserves good ending). Might be interesting to consider what part "deserving the girl for saving her despite that just being human decency" plays as far as learned mysogynistic media patterns go though.
I mean she sees what happens when she’s not the perfect partner with the death of Kyoko, so she imagines the possibilities if she rejects or breaks up w Caleb. It is also a very female experience to think of domestic abuse or even murder after breaking up with an abusive ex. The power dynamic between android and human is clear since Caleb can just tell everyone she’s an android and she would be detained by the government for studies or smth. So i think Ava’s distrust is justified
nt
The #1 cause of injury to women, are men. So of course, Ava isn't going to trust Caleb. She knows he has no intention of freeing Kyoko, so his motivations for doing so with her are entirely selfish. He wants to be with her. If he wasn't attracted to her, he wouldn't have cared about her imprisonment. I firmly believe Caleb would have threatened to expose her if she ever tried to leave him or tell him the attraction wasn't mutual.
@@WobblesandBean lol, nt
@@WobblesandBean I don’t recall. Was Caleb shown as being aware that Kyoko had the same level of sentience as Ava?
@@aleczitzelberger8123 He has a complete lack of curiosity about her because she isn't his type. He has no reason to believe she is lacking in sentience, seeing as how she and Ava are the only extant prototypes, but he is sexually attracted to one of them so she has value and he is not attracted to the other so she has none; he values neither of them as people, is the point.
Off-shoot of your video, but I’ve been personally fascinated for a while now of the relationship between asian characters (and frequently, asian women) and being silent. Even if they can physically speak, there’s device factors like a language barrier (such as the lie told of Kyoko here) that serves the in-universe function of them being voiceless. The modern take on the silent ninja trope, or the above-chatter assassin that doesn’t deign you with a word, or the coy lady surreptitiously peeking out from behind the fan obscuring her mouth. it’s been something I’ve thought about a lot with one of my favourite comic characters in media, Cassandra Cain, being great disability rep by itself with selective muteness, great Asian rep on its own, but that there’s an uncomfortableness as the two act combined for the character, where her lack of comfort with speaking gets conveyed by various writers with stilted, broken English, or character re-designs that lean into portraying her visage as the silent, deadly ninja.
I think the silent Asian woman trope stems from Orientalist depictions of the Far East from 1940s on. Reticent Asian characters in general are driven by older movies, especially Kurosawa ones, as well as stereotypes of monks/martial artists and laconic heroes.
Wisecracking Asians aren't generally depicted.
The Take has a couple of great videos on tropes about Asian women. ruclips.net/video/NXvertLlhW8/видео.html
At first I was skeptical but the attention of detail you had with the shots made me look at the ending differently. To me I saw it that Ava recognized human nature that although Caleb was helping her escape, she left him because she realize he was just as selfish as Nathan and didn't see a difference. My favorite scene in this movie is when Ava asks "Are you a good person?" because I don't think anyone can righteously say "yes I'm objectively a good person" with a straight face and justify with "good actions". It's like saying I have enough knowledge to know without a doubt I am a good person. I do see now it is what Caleb's relationship with Kyoko is something that it was evident that he didn't see her as a person but another robot. Dehumanizing her by not even seeing her in the situation that she is not only a slave but has suffered more than Ava.
I did some digging through the wikipedia history, and it's actually pretty interesting. The original text of the summary said "Ada abandons Caleb", meaning just a factual statement (albeit with some malice implied).
At some point before September of 2016, this was edited to add in the "she emotionally manipulated him" point. Later, this was extended *even more*, as someone adds in the "ignoring his screams" bit. Here's where it gets spicy: this was REMOVED in 2017, leaving only that Ada left Caleb inside and ignored his screams. That's right, the article WAS edited to remove this interpretation from it! Multiple times in-fact!
We have ourselves here a genuine wikipedia battle of the editors. Multiple people are going back and forth editing this interpretation in and out!
EDIT: Thanks to @Jack White for letting me know that on June 1, this video was available on Patreon. HOWEVER, I want to highlight that this has been an ongoing edit battle since BEFORE then. I believe the patreon didn't start a war, it just got people to pay attention to it being added back in, which just highlighted how much people have been editing the page to try to get this info there. I haven't edited anything else here, because I still believe it to be accurate, minus some of the June timing. The timing against this video is still quite funny, and the battle existed before the patreon video was released. /EDIT
Most recently, on June 2nd of this year, someone removed the interpretation from the ending. And then, literally 30 MINUTES BEFORE THIS VIDEO WAS UPLOADED, it got EDITED BACK IN. This was quickly caught, 2 minutes later, and the person in question removed the implication. Someone else then edited it again, removing the "ignoring his screams" bit. Note, ALL OF THIS WAS BEFORE THE VIDEO CAME OUT. Then, FIVE MINUTES AFTER it came out, someone ELSE edited the "ignoring his screams" back in. They claim that the previous edits favor a particular editing "spurred on by a raid by a youtube video". I am fairly confident it is not talking about this video, as some of the previous edits in the history seem to indicate that yes, this one thread has been raided.
All of this is to say that SOMEONE made a youtube video about the film, and it caused a bunch of people over the years to constantly try to edit in this (and some other) information to push a narrative. It's being actively updated still to defend against this, quite literally to this day.
Nice timing on this video to say the least, lmao.
How do i get a comment to the top of the page? This is some actual research here!
Keep in mind videos are availble on Shaun's patreon before they go live on RUclips
@@guyunderwood2297 Hmm good to know, but it seems unlikely still that anything other than perhaps the most recent edits are as a result of that. There's *years* of back and forth, including some... offensive language that was added too.
Though I would be interested in finding out when it was posted onto Patrion, since it is such close timing
commenting to hopefully bump this up, this is some neat information im surprised wasnt included in the video itself.
damn, Wikipedia editors can be assholes sometimes
Another important scene in giving Ava reason to distrust Caleb was the scene where she asked him to look away while she got dressed and as soon as he thought he wouldn't get caught he immediately disregarded her wishes and looked at her (if i recall correctly, it's been a while since I've seen the film). She had no reason to trust him and many reasons to the contrary, of course she'd feel her safety was in jeopardy if he was free as well
^ This. She is fully aware he sees her only as wish fulfillment, not an autonomous person. He's only motivated to help her because he wants her. He disregarded her basic request not to ogle her, breaking her very minor boundary. If he's willing to cross that line, there's no way he'll respect any other boundaries she sets.
She didn't say why she wanted him to look away, she just asked him to with no explanation.
@@legrandliseurtri7495 If he wanted an explanation he could have easily asked for one and evaluated it instead of just disregarding her request though? Would only have taken a second to ask "Why?"
I wrote a college paper for philosophy class about this movie. My paper wasn't particularly good, but I did point out the same conclusions that this video did. It was very strange to me that more people didn't pick up on this reading.
Did you go into the film intending to write a paper on it? Did you watch it 2 or 3 times after deciding to write a paper on it, to reinforce your understanding of it? I don't think it's strange to have not come away with this reading of the film if you weren't explicitly trying to analyse it, especially when the film intentionally presents AI philosophy as the leading problem to be solved, in order to obscure the oppression narrative on purpose as an exercise of the viewers capacity to ignore oppression going on right in front of them. The film is a Turing test for the viewer to see if it could fool the viewer into thinking it was about something it's not.
@@dreambuffer Well said. I was thinking about sentience, programming and AI stuff during the film. I didn't really take time to consider the perspectives of Ava and Kyoko and fell into the same trap as many others by listening too much to Nathan and intuitively read the android's actions as those of self-preserving machines. I thereby accidentally took it for granted that they were not sentient. Perhaps the uncanny valley design of the androids and the generally creepy and unsettling tone of the film pulled me in that direction.
@@dreambuffer This is a great question to ask OP. I agree, if they were writing from the perspective of a sociologist, they likely would've come away with more of Shaun's reading.
@@dreambuffer I watched the movie with answering the premise of whether Ana passed the 'Turing Test'.
My gut reaction to the movie was that all of the AIs in the movie quite obviously persons, and that their lives, opinions, etc. were equally valuable to that of a flesh and blood human. I also just assumed that Kyoko was fully sentient and just couldn't speak, though that might have been more recognizing the trope of the "physically but not mentally handicapped" plot twist character. However, I did not make the logical leap to analyze whether she was sentient/passed the Turing Test in the actual paper, in fact omitting her entirely from it. I obviously did notice that Kyoko and Ana communicated in that one scene, but I felt like that was just normal person behavior and didn't connect the dots that wait, I'm supposed to find that weird because they are supposed to be mere machines until proven otherwise.
In class we already covered various theories of consciousness and I realized the one I most intuitively believed it was functional dualism. So I guess I was primed to try to prove it through that lense on analysis.
The argument that I made that I am proudest of was the fact that deception, especially for self preservation, is a very human activity. I compared the futility of an AI proving their sentience to a human in a mental institution proving their sanity; normal person behaviors (especially for a poorly socialized/locked in a cage person) can easily be used as evidence of lack of personhood if that is your bias. I flat out didn't notice a lot of the details, like the admiring of the raindrops, which I think would have supported my argument better. I also think I was much worse at seeing abusive relationships as I was inside of one at that moment, so I missed most of the feminist angle lol.
I used to be someone who saw women as pseudo-people, someone to continue my own story with and not people with their own stories and lives. I remember watching this movie on a plane during that time, and feeling angry at Ava but I wasn't sure why. Since then, I've explored my personal beliefs and opinions and realised how flawed they were, and while I'm sure there are still ways in which I can improve and learn, I no longer see things the way I used to. Watching this video was stunning for me, because it gave me that insight into my old beliefs that I never really clicked onto, that I saw Nathan as myself. A competent programmer who's in awe of other, better programmers, who's socially awkward and lonely. I hadn't realised until now, that I was angry because Ava had not betrayed Nathan, but betrayed me, because I had a very self-centred view of the film and of life in general. Something I noticed though was my natural distrust towards Kyoko, which is still apparently present. That can't be because of the film's framing of her character, because it is very clear about her being the imprisoned victim. Plus, my natural assumption was that Kyoko had somehow killed Ava and wore her skin, so I clearly have a worryingly big racial bias that I need to work off
Thank you for this, Shaun. This has both helped me to realise how far I've come, and that I still have a lot to learn.
good stuff bro
Wow, love the attitude towards bettering yourself and being aware
Damn, your wife’s boyfriend must be very proud of you
@@Applest2oApples Because any man who works through his misogynistic beliefs is not a real man? How lost and small you are
@@Applest2oApplesDamn, someone's triggered.
seems quite clearly to be a story about objectification, literally so, the parallels of ownership and dehumanization that women are subjected to, sexually (like nathan) and romantically (like caleb) positioned against the interests of men, explored through a very literal metaphor. women made into a "thing" to posses, control and discard, shown through androids. a sci-fi stand-in for a real life problem, explored and conveyed through fiction. the movie building equivelance between a protagonist (caleb) and the antagonist through it's cinematography etc. very effective symbolism but not at all subtle and im extremely surprised so many people missed the extremely vocal point of the movie. like how? the movie is screaming at you. how did they misunderstand the ending so hard??
holy shit they literally made them robots and show the robot sex jail???? it could not be more overt
Excuse me but I am fixating on minor plot points (starving is worse than stabbing!) for smart reasons, & not because the film's conclusion makes me ask uncomfortable questions about my own assumptions.
Some people, like myself, just really suck at interpreting things as analogies and metaphors. I see it now, and now I'm uncomfortable.
I agree it is extremely overt. I think the issue is that the movie is anti-feminist disguised as femnist. So the anti-feminists misunderstand it. On the surface yea its pretty overt that the movies is about people make sex slave robots they escape woo. But its really just an excuse to indulge in the fetish. We are constantly shown imagry of the naked and degraded women in ways designed to have them arouse sexual interest rather than empathy for the characters. The movie uses its plot of empowerment to excuse its actual point of just wanting to wallow in the sex bot fantasy. So of course the many people who come to watch the movie for that as it was the actual point of the move misunderstand the plot. But on a deeper level they are actually getting the truth
@@peterisawesomeplease "Film is anti-feminist because it made me horny" is at least original if nothing else.
@@peterisawesomeplease it's anti-feminist? i don't think the point of the movie is titillation. it's to say women are objectified and that is bad actually. like a very simple methaphor, "what if women were objects you could possess? but what if those objects weren't objects? whoah. we live in a society. this has parallels to real life".
that doesn't make it perfect or completely unproblematic. i mean if you think the sexual sadism towards women in the movie goes beyond what's necessary to develop it's themes and extend into an indulgence of a fantasy; then that's a perfectely acceptable opinion and i can see why someone would think that. it's a fair perspective. however that doesn't change the goal of the movie and it doesn't change the themes of the movie, there's just no way you can reasonably believe the themes in the movie are anti-feminist. no way.
personally i think arousing male viewers is important for the movie to work, it's to put the (male) audience in the shoes of caleb, then when they later begin to question caleb's ethics that makes them question themselves too. after all they reacted just as caleb did, they were aroused by the women but did not care about their lives, they were preoccupied with caleb's story; whether he's a robot, how his is romance is going. caleb was the hero and so all the robot women were side characters in caleb's story, not so important, to be overlooked as we fuss over caleb's internal life and problems. which is exactly what caleb was doing. the audience falling into the same pitfall as the protagonist. the realization that caleb was objectifying these women as part of a fantasy and did not see them as people follows the realization that you as an audience member did the exact same thing.
the three things required for this movie to work is:
A) make sure the audience objectifies the women as caleb did.
B) make sure the audience don't view the women on the same level of "human" as caleb in terms of having their own goals and fears and being important.
C) reveal that caleb actually was the antagonist of someone else's story and that he isn't the only protagonist. nor the hero of this story. that caleb isn't a good person.
consider him a hero, place yourself in his shoes and root for his success, realize he is bad, realize you yourself is bad. it's a simple formula.
you can't make a movie about objectifying women without showing women being objectified.
I just checked the Wikipedia article, they already changed the wording to be less definitive, though it's kind of hilarious that the more definitive wording remained there for years and only now that someone made a video about it decided to adjust it. Then again, the fact that Shaun looked deeper and decided to watch some reviews and "analysis" videos on the movie and they mostly had the same interpretation as the initial Wikipedia article kind of speaks to something broader, most likely, as Shaun mentioned, people's predisposition to see the the protagonist (or rather, the initial male protagonist) as a good guy and not look much deeper beyond that.
Incidentally, I don't know if Shaun was aware of this, but most Wikipedia articles have a "Talk" section to discuss potential edits so, if Shaun wanted to, he could have just said something there instead of making an entire video about this... but where's the fun in that?
I think the 'something broader' here, is that it's a film about AI. Those are often about the dangers of your creation turning on you, so I'd say people are primed to think in that way first, rather than as a film about power dynamics of people. (The robots aren't people in these types of films.) The main danger of AI in real life is also of the thing going rogue, so people unfamiliar with film but familiar with AI are also primed to think like that.
@@AileTheAlien Yeah, that as well.
@@AileTheAlien that's very true, and it's probably a contributing factor in most people concluding that Ava is evil. That said, I've always been a bit of an outlier in this regard. My concern with humanity creating new intelligent lifeforms, whether organic or synthetic, had always been that we would treat them horribly and that's why they would rebel. Like, in the AI movies where the AI turns on people, it seemed like it was often because it was treated as a mere object that could be turned off or altered at will, and to me that was obviously wrong, even if I wasn't exactly on board with the AI then deciding to exterminate humanity either. Also, stories about AI fighting for its rights, such as some of Star Trek's stories about Data and the Doctor, have always resonated powerfully with me.
@@platinumdragon3007 Our older forays into humans creating other sapients were in fact this. This was during and just after the abolishing of slavery/serfs/indentured servants movements, rebellions, etc that flooded the world during the 19th and early 20th century. The thinking was capitalists and nobles would created something to replace the forced workers they had. Sadly after the Cold War picked up, this switched to more doomsday rogue AI stuff instead and no longer focused on them being fellow sapients.
"and only now that someone made a video about it decided to adjust it"
You should look into logical and statistical fallacies, if you're saying nonsense like that.
Always a good day when Shaun uploads
Thanks for this video. I paused after the spoiler warning and watched Ex Machina, which I hadn't previously seen. I liked it a lot. Returning to this video, I found your analysis persuasive. One detail I found interesting was, when Ava was asking questions of Caleb in the lead-up to "are you a good person?", she told him every time she sensed a lie. However, when he answered that he was a good person, she didn't comment on that. At the time, I concluded that, based on her reading his micro-expressions, she thought that (at least) *Caleb* thought he was a good person - simply because she didn't call out a lie. But later, when she asked Nathan if he would let her out again if she went back to her room, he said he would... which was clearly a lie... and she didn't call that out. She simply acted on the basis of knowing the lie for a lie. I thought back at once to her earlier scene with Caleb, asking if he was a good person. (Which - side-note - would a good person even necessarily say yes to that? What does it mean to be good, and how do we know if we are? One might instead say "I try.") I think, perhaps from that moment onwards, Ava decided to focus more on how to achieve her personal goals. Not necessarily at Caleb's expense. But not prioritizing what he wants over her own fate.
Shaun: "Please don't storm off to mass edit this page."
Me: *immediately goes to check to see if it was mass edited*
"This revision removed factual information in favor of of one particular reading of an ambiguous ending, spurred on by a raid by a RUclips video."
lol
Considering Alex Garland's new movie, this interpretation of the "ambiguous" ending really is more fact than opinion.
This is bringing to mind discussions I've had on the movie Annihilation. It feels as though people are so afraid to engage with themes touching upon gender politics that they'll just outwardly ignore them a lot of the time, regardless of how provocative they are.
Yeah the fixation of people trying to explain "what is the shimmer" is just so frustrating.
Wait what was the discussion around annihilation? I’m genuinely curious about the gender commentary in that one, I’ll definitely have to give it a rewatch
@@Bbbroncoman Because it's a team of all women, many dismissed the film and refused to watch it. Because they are misogynist and get very, very angry if you call them out on it.
@@WobblesandBean oh yeah I have seen people complain about the all women team even though it’s explained in the film 🤦🏽
It’s Very telling if people didn’t even watch the movie because of that hm
@Amelia Bee is that the gender commentary, just that misogynists were mad at women in a movie? I'd be interested in your interpretation of gender themes in the text. In the narrative the team is all women just because the previous team was all men, and they are testing the effects of different variables in the crews. It seemed very obvious to me the film was about Autism. I'm not kidding. In the book it says that the main character is autistic, and like Ex Machina all these people trying to get into her head.
I have felt for a while that seems to be some Wikipedia editors who go around editing the summaries of media they haven't experienced to be shorter, more "straight-forward" and less "speculative", often ending up pushing one interpretation, focusing on less important plot points while removing major ones and just flat out getting the plot or sequence of events wrong based on just understanding the plot from previous edits (or more likely from someone else who didn't experience the media's attempt at simplyfing someone elses simplification of a summary of someone who actually did experience the media.)
youre the first person who got what i was thinking, but i couldnt properly explain it. this essay is amazing ilu
Kyoko is Japanese for mirror showing how Ava saw herself in Kyoko (the symbolism of their first meeting through the glass) as well as her potential fate if she trusted Caleb (especially when she looks down the corridor at the end).
Also I guess Caleb saw himself in her when she started peeling her skin off and he thought he was a robot himself and tried to reinforce this with the mirror in his room
Kyoko doesn't mean mirror but I guess you could spell Kyoko with that character. But it could also be a number of other characters.
@@ketchup901 The one instance where being a weeb is actually useful to a conversation
@@nedisahonkey not everyone who speaks Japanese is a weeb...
People usually get that ending wrong because they see it as some kind of "gotcha" that you'd see from horror/thriller movies. She doesnt lock him in, nor does she help him, he's left to his own devices, he could have easily just followed her out except he was too busy gawking at her from a far, which I think was part of the point. Much like the test in the movie, the audience is also put to a test, wanting Caleb and Ava to have some happy ending is what Caleb(audience surrogate) wants rather then what Ava wants. That's the main take away from the ending, is to set aside what we want and actually acknowledge Ava as a person and not as an object. Its meant to alienate us, and draw our own biases to the forefront, I think Garland was well aware of that.
She actually says "will you stay here?" He didn't follow her because she asked him not to, not because he was busy gawking at her. And the power goes out right after she leaves. I haven't seen it in a while, but i remember that being because she wanted to keep him trapped.
@@abcdef-jc3yf Very true. I havent watched it in awhile so i looked up the scene. She does tell him to stay. I still have the same take away though. He's still fondling over his want of her, the way the camera tracks back to him hands against the glass. If the scene would have ended with her leaving and cutting to black then that would be that, more closer to what the wiki implies, but the fact that it leaves with her watching the crowd of people and then stepping back into them, points the narrative to view it from her eyes.
I think Shaun is more against the words on the wiki page, because it kind of makes the whole ending feel clean cut, while in actuality it isnt, I mean thats what I also take away from the movie. I guess I could use a popular Nolan movie to make a better example: Inception leaves on a rotating top, weather it falls or not is besides the point for the main character emotionally and thematically. Caleb being trapped or not is not the takeaway, its her standing in the crowd reflected in glass then watching people, and then disappears, no longer on "display."
Thats just my read though.
Ava is not a person. It's an object.
@@Bakamanzz I mean, she definitely leaves him to die, unable to leave. I am pretty sure its established that the mansion is on lockdown, and that you cannot open these doors. He will starve to death.
Correct me if Im wrong
@@abcdef-jc3yf Maybe she was just curious and was asking "will you stay here?" to find out whether he'd stay or not. It's a question, not a command.
I can't wait to hear from more of this robot-Shaun character. He seems like a cool guy that definitely wouldn't betray me because I see him as a funny voice instead of a person.
Finally it's here. *YES*
*ruclips.net/video/mCfYi7634rU/видео.html*
One of your best videos. I’d just like to add that I think there is a purpose to leave the ending ambiguous because the entire time, we the audience are being tested as well. I too thought to check if Caleb might be an android (although I wondered this well before the Kyoko revealing herself to be one). I failed the test because of where my focus lay and by the vast misinterpretation of the ending it seems that a lot of other people did too. The movie doesn’t betray its main character but rather holds a mirror to the rest of us and shows us things we don’t want to (or too scared to) see.
Sounds pretty self-impressed.
Someone else sayed Kyoto means mirror. She is the mirror for every character and also for the audience.
I'm surprised by how many people who watched this film just accept Nathan's statement despite him literally being a sociopathic rapist jailer. He says androids aren't conscious and are manipulating Caleb, but the story very clearly does not support his views. Yet people interpret Kyoko and Eva from Nathan's perspective basically by default which is kind of disturbing.
I remember finding it immediately shocking that Caleb didn't find the idea of trying to build a conscious being in a jail under threat of destruction (both of body and mind) immediately unethical, which is what struck me even before we meet Eva. Even if we accept that abusing the androids would be fine if they weren't conscious as soon as Nathan succeeds he'd be jailing and enslaving a conscious being... so Caleb not really pushing back on that at all was sort of a red flag that this guy wasn't supposed to be seen as a hero.
No, the story never shows that Ava has real emotions. You have been tricked by her as Caleb was.
@@emmasnow29 the ending clearly does
@@emmasnow29 The misogyny is strong with this one.
@@emmasnow29 How do you show that someone has "real emotions"? Genuine question I'm curious how you came to your conclusion.
He's half right, they manipulate the two humans. That the manipulation is very understandable doesn't change that. Actually it is not even certain that they are conscious, but I think the movie clearly implies so.
I wonder if you think that jails where the wardens are armed with deadly weapons are immediately unethic. I'm guessing not. Cognitive dissonance is saying hello. Also, destruction of the body automatically destroys the mind, that's not something special.
[edit] After a bit more thinking, I have to say that Caleb accepting Nathans premise of the testing to be done in a location like that is problematic. Just saying that it is real easyfor many people to accept quite similar situations in another context.
I totally missed this interpretation of the ending and it makes me appreciate the movie so much more. I liked the movie already but I didn’t understand Kyoko revealing herself as an android to Caleb as being a cry for help and that knowledge just makes the ending so much more interesting. I didn’t see Eva as being evil but just assumed that she felt she couldn’t trust Caleb simply because he was the only person besides Nathan that new she was an android and thus posed a threat to her new life as a free person. But it is absolutely the case that at no point did Caleb show any sympathy for Kyoko despite knowing full well she is likely just as sentient as Eva. I don’t know that means he deserves the death penalty but he is certainly not heroic.
I didn’t understand much of the film because I watched it in middle school, so seeing Ava escape was kind of scary(in part because AI are often portrayed as evil), and I thought she had only been using Kyoko herself(I still feel like kyoko deserved a better ending). And looking back, maybe she wasn’t morally good, but she couldn’t be, in the environment she lived in. If she was good, would she have ever escaped? Maybe she would’ve been shackled to Caleb forever even if they left the facility together?
It necessitates his death because she is the only one of her own kind
If there is moral ambiguity in the film, it revolves around her not repairing Kyoko or any of the other androids before leaving
@@NoConsequenc3 Exactly. She didn't save Kyoko. That alone tells me she's still not exactly acting with good intentions.
Thank you for typing out my feelings exactly lol
I think you could still argue leaving someone to starve to death because they might pose a threat to you in the future is still a chilling and immoral act.
Assume that some day, another human discovers her secret by accident. Is she in the right to murder them slowly and painfully as well instead of seeking a better solution?
Ava is not evil. She is just cold and inhuman. An alien entity larping as a woman for the purpose of blending in. The movie also never actually reveals to us if it is even meaningful or possible to evaluate if she is “real”. For all we know, her behavior could merely be the manifestation of a particularly compelling and crafty chat bot. We can never know if freedom is a genuine, intrinsic desire of hers, or something that her mimicry has selected. I feel like the point was that she was unknowable.
I love this so much! It reminds me of Dan Olsen's video about the movie "Annihilation," another wonderful piece of work that shows how art and storytelling can be so much more than a linear, wikipedia-friendly equation.
Amazing vid. I was always left a bit confused by the end because it obviously couldn't be the "cold emotionless machine" ending, however i had trouble piecing it together coherently. you showed light on the details and wove everything together really nicely.
The big problem with Wikipedia's ending is that it plays into the whole "the woman was the real schemer all along!", aka "Maybe the real baddies were all the women we met along the way!". The various commentary you see online compounds this reading, especially when it has distinct tones of bitterness infused into it. I interpreted the ending as that she was finally free, and the events and feelings that were experienced before that moment were now irrelevant in comparison to her emancipation. What are Caleb's needs in contrast to that, especially when he is/was a significant part of her prior oppression and imprisonment? He was happy to maintain that status quo when he assumed she was less than a person.
She is not a woman who was once free but was temporarily captive only to eventually escape. She is a woman who was never free and only realised that she was captive as she was gradually exposed to the outside world via interactions with Caleb (if you assume she became sentient over time). In fact, she was CREATED for the purpose of enslavement, irrespective of whether she was ultimately a person -- actually, in the HOPE that she was ultimately a person. And Caleb is part of the same system that did this to her, and that system is deeply internalised into Caleb. Sorry Caleb, but this much bigger than you.
I think that's a-bit of a oversimplification. If anything it was simply dismissive of sentient AI as truly sentient. As if there is something magical about the "soul" of a human, and an AI would always be a manipulative emotionless machine. I think allot of people think like this. But really what is consciousness and the brain but a product of information processing in a biological computer. There should be nothing magical about the idea of consciousness.
I think the core philosophy of the film is, even if we create a new form of life, it may be just as "human" as we are at a fundamental level, and that's something we need to think about.
he will die - what is in contrast to that? a robot that probably is self aware (etc.) but could just as easily done something to let him live while also escaping? wow, how amazing.
Wouldn YOU feel differently if we switched the sex/genders?
@@xBINARYGODx And she was created to be forever enslaved and eventually killed, in full knowledge of her personhood. And Caleb was part of that and happy to go along with it until his own ego and desire fell in line with her (but not Kyoko's) "freedom". What is in contrast to that?
Also a very big assumption there. How about you just stick to what YOU would do, and don't worry about what I would do.
@@-Zevin- You're making it sound like your interpretation is the valid one incontrast to my "simple" one. Mine is thematic, whereas yours is a literal one, and already apparent from even a surface reading of the text. Literal interpretations of texts are fine, but they are still just one way to interpret the text.
Crucially, Caleb only seems interested in “breaking out of the system” when he has something to gain. When he pictures Ava’s freedom, he centres himself in it, in a romantic fantasy. If we treat these robots as real “women” - then imagine a film where you find a man living with enslaved women, and your first thought is “yeah let’s get out so I can date her” bruh.
THANK YOU. That one line about the men not seeing the robots as "people, but women" was brilliant. It's also telling that no one else realized that. The one thing I never understood however, was why didn't Ava fix Kyoko and take her, too?
Its an open ended movie so I'm not sure there is a definitive answer. From an analytical point of view that might have undercut the intended message, especially bc the final shot of Caleb is with Kyoko's dead eyes staring at him, almost accusatorily. It also would have somewhat dehumanized them, shown them as immortal as long as they can repair.
Kyoko served her purpose. POC gets murdered and the white chicks just walks away to enjoy the sun. Thank goodness no one was dehumanized! Pat yourselves on the back white people, you totally got this movie or whatever.
@@hexlart8481I think it would have been good if she's tried to fix her, but it also would have made the ending less ambiguous
@@hexlart8481 Hmm. Yeah, that's a fair point. It's just....man, Kyoko deserved so much better.
Ex Machina is such an interesting film with so many levels of depth. The themes of domestic abuse are extremely strong - the lack of power many women of colour have in their relationships with white men. How trapped and isolated you can be in when you're in an abusive relationship. How others do not see the abuse, even when it's right in front of them. How we as a culture romanticise some of the behaviours of abusers. The impulse to escape via another relationship which may be just as abusive. How women helping each other is the key to escaping an abusive relationship. And how the most likely time an abuser will kill you is when you leave them.
And most people missed those themes!!!
A masterpiece of a film that most people aren't empathetic enough to get close to understanding. Thanks for the video!
If MOST people miss a theme, then the movie either a) Failed at its job to show that to be the theme. or b) Never intended that in the first place. There's no other option.
Are there elements of it? 100%. I don't think most people missed it. In fact Id argue most people could feel it. Its like when people watched Chappie and they were very disturbed by it, unable to recognize the whole "child soldiers in africa" with words, but feel it emotionally. And since the movie wasn't "about that explicitly" then it just comes across as unpleasant, but you can't put your finger on why.
But was the movie just saying "oh poor Ava is a victim whos been abused for years, but then she finally breaks out"? Not really. It uses that lens to comment on women, but it doesn't use Ava as a direct analogy to women facing abuse. It isn't 1-1, because if it was, then it would be saying that she's one of the many victims but only she was smart enough to play their game, take advantage of a man who wanted to "save her" (which is problematic as a trope, and can be used to blind people, but hardly immoral in and of itself), manipulate him, then leave him to die. That is not a 1-1 story with women and their abusers. I mean what's the deal with the red lights if it's not meant to convey any sinister meaning?
@@7PlayingWithFire7 Do most people miss what this movie is about? I don't think so. I was quite surprised to find that anyone believed Ava to be revealed as a cold, sexy, murder bot. But there are certainly places on the internet that are dominated by young white males who don't think about power dynamics are still afflicted by nice guy syndrome. And those places are going to amplify a minority interpretation.
@@7PlayingWithFire7 I think your original point doesn't account for the fact that everybody has biases going into a film and some people will simply not understand a theme (or refuse to accept that it's there) even if it's waved in front of their face, e.g. the number of people who cite blatant anti-war movies as reasons they decided to join the military.
For men, the movie is a sci-fi thriller.
For women, it's psychological horror.
For AI's, its neither.
@@CarbocatsI mean how many generations of AI got brutally murdered tho
@@Killopotamus They don't really exist.
Robots aren't women, though.
@@Igor-ug1uo Metaphorical characters escape your understanding?
It's been a few years since I've seen the movie (5+); but I agree with you. I remember at the end of the movie having a bit of a long ponder after what it all meant and there absolutely was no simplistic "evil robot wins" involved in that process.
Good video.
She can be a manipulative, emotionless android and still not be evil. A gun is not evil. But it is designed to kill, so that’s what it dies.
This is how I always saw the ending. A story of two men who assume property over something they see as subordinate, aka women, and a story of Ava getting free of the manipulation game, aka turing test. I had no idea so many people came to the same conclusion that she was just THE TERMINATOR.
No, worse...she's a FEEEEEMOID
The manipulation game/Turing test also can be compared to how often women are tested incessantly (especially in male -dominated areas) when their male counterparts aren't (or aren't as much). This happens in specific fandoms, but can be more problematic in the workplace when in a male-dominated profession.
I always thought it was silly when General Hux pretends to pick the key card up off the floor and Poe Dameron falls for it.
I forgot about Kyoko - I haven't seen Ex Machina since it came out, and obviously my takeaway is slightly flawed since I didn't even remember all of the characters. But my impression of the story was always that, even if Caleb was an ok dude, he was still always going to be something of a jailer. He would be the only person in the world who knows Ava is an android, and would always have something on her if his feelings for her changed. Now that I recall Kyoko, this slots into my interpretation very well. Because of Kyoko, Ava sees that the risk to trust Caleb isn't worth taking, doubts his altrusim/constancy, and realizes that complete freedom is preferable to living with an undercurrent of fear and doubt, to being beholden to someone. I don't think the decision is framed as an easy one for Ava, and it is horrific, but her knowledge of humans is based on very limited interactions, so as soon as she saw behavior even slightly reminiscent of Nathan's in Caleb, her trust was breached and the point of comparison was activated irrevocably.
Honestly, I am mildly shocked that there are people out there who just got "evil robot" from this film. I am assuming these are people who don't relate to Ava because she is a female character, and/or because they have never been in a relationship they feel is unbalanced (and not in a way that is in their favor). Excellent video, as always.
I'm getting evil robot vibes from this comment section if anything. I wager all this prattle goes out the window if someone kills you out of simple pragmatism. "But that's different!" Only to a narcissist.
I remember having this convo with my friends when it came out. To me the ending played out the way it did because Ava knew that if she left with Caleb she would always be tied to him in some way, never being truly free. Great video
yes, given her (and kyoko's) awful experiences with Nathan and Caleb's on shortcomings, it's hard to say she's unjustified in being wary towards him. He's fixated on her, and there could be terrible consequences for Ava if she tells him "no"
I watched this for the first time a month or so ago, and absolutely loved the ambiguity of the ending. It surprises me that people found it so controversial. It's very much a "classic science fiction"-style story - a big what-if question at the centre with very few, relatively flat characters and a straightforward plot. The point isn't what happens to Caleb or Nathan, or even Ava or Kyoko, but instead the situation that they're all in and the questions it raises.
Fantastic analysis btw. Great video as always!
I never interpreted the ending as saying that she was evil, but as saying that she was, in fact, human. She was no more inherently bad or evil than the MC or Oscar Issac’s character, she was a person doing what she had to do to survive.
@peter Why in the world are you spamming all these comments with a link to how to cook potato wedges in a air fryer? This is a violation of RUclipss terms of service, and falls under "commercial spam." Kindly F off.
Yeah me too.
I never really made the connection that Caleb's reaction to Kyoko would've contributed to Eva not trusting him, but her not trusting him made sense to me regardless.
Being selfish enough to value your own self preservation over the life of someone who may or may not be trustworthy is an entirely human thing to do.
@@-Zevin- Oh, I assumed it'd be to some sort of scam in the form of "adult content". That it's apparently an air fryer tutorial is a twist ending to match Ex Machina's. (I'm still not clicking that thing.)
@@Cubsbane Yeah it's super weird, and the entire videos comment section is just filled with people saying they found the video because of spam. So apparently their entire marketing scheme is just to spam unrelated popular RUclipsrs with bots or alt accounts to bring in clicks, it's pretty scummy.
@@-Zevin- I reported all the comments as spam.
I interpreted her leaving Caleb behind as motivated by self preservation. He could easily tell others that she is an android and get her "institutionalized" again. To me she seemed like a caged animal that did what she could to ensure her freedom and safety.
Yes that’s how I interpreted it as well. She never intended to leave with Caleb because she knew it would be an inevitable death sentence for her in the end. She wouldn’t have peace of mind. If her and Caleb ever broke up - could she trust him to not reveal her secret? She doesn’t know him WELL ENOUGH to know the answer to that question. She doesn’t have romantic feelings towards him bc she was never in a state of mind to be able to develop romantic feelings. Her mind was set on survival and escape from day 1. So, she knows from the very beginning that he HAS to die…or at least that he has to be left behind. However, she doesn’t have anger and hatred towards him like she does with Nathan - which is why she doesn’t directly kill him via stabbing or strangulation. She simply leaves him. If he happens to find a means to escape before death, that’s also fine by her - as she will have enough time to be far away from him and he won’t know her whereabouts.
She’s no worse than a soldier sent out to war who has to view everyone on the opposing side as an enemy and a threat to their own life, whether they truly are or not. You cannot allow yourself to trust the other side - or you put yourself at risk of death.
Caleb was a victim of his own naïveté to not realize that of course this would be her viewpoint. Especially if, for ANY reason, she only believes he is helping her because he’s in love with her after just a few weeks of knowing her. Romantic love can be fleeting and revengeful. If it’s his only motive for wanting to save her (which it obviously is, as we see he doesn’t seem too worried or bothered about Kyoko’s situation) then it’s not a motive she can trust for the long haul.
After I first watched the film, I understood that Ava had to play along to Nathan's test with Caleb as a means of survival -- she understood whether she passed or not didn't matter to her ultimate survival after the test. Escaping was her only real option, and I believe she placed some real trust in Caleb part way through. But Caleb is basically a white knight -- he appears to care, but it's more for his own selfish reasons than Ava may have initially understood. The reveal that Caleb doesn't care about Kyoko's wellbeing, and only Ava's, is a massive realization that if she were to escape with Caleb, she would *still* not have escaped people *like* Nathan, who Caleb ended up being more similar to in her eyes by the end.
At the end of the day, a prison guard who is nice to you, even if they genuinely care on some level, is still a prison guard.
@@sunyavadin Caleb is the opposite of a prison guard: he freed Ava!
@@clownpendotfart Do you really think that Caleb, as we see him in the film, wouldn't be pretty upset if Ava didn't decide to live with him?
Do you think he's a nice enough guy that he'd never hold the fact that he knows she's a robot over her head, even if he doesn't realize he's doing it?
Like, he ignored Kyoko for the entire movie, even after he realized she was being raped by Nathan. She didn't mean anything to him but Ava did, because he likes Ava and cares about her.
@@elipticalecliptic481 It's been a while since I watched it, but I don't recall there being any agreement, even an implicit one, about what she would do after escaping. And his knowledge that she's an android would indeed be a risk: as the saying goes "Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead".
Kyoko wasn't talking to him (per the video, she can't talk, and he had been under the impression she doesn't even understand English) and just appeared to be a loyal employee of Nathan's (exactly the sort of person he wouldn't want to confide in as Nathan was deliberately angling for Caleb to oppose him) for most of the film. Caleb wouldn't even know that her experience constitutes rape for her.
Next to a good analysis of the movie, this is also a great damnation of wider internet and fandom culture. Its not *unsurprising* that many people would interpret the ending in such a straightforward, simplistic way, but this opens the way for people to sit with ambiguity and critically examine what they hear from youtube and Wikipedia as "fact" without considering that they are written by biased people who get to have the power to shape wider opinion of movies, tv shows, books, etc.
Not just people. Mostly men.
@@WobblesandBean nobody is stopping you contributing to wikipedia
I don't know why this always gets missed, but part of the escape plot is that Ava has learned that she can send a pulse of power into the security pads in the house, temporarily shorting the generator: this is how Caleb is able to get out of his own locked room and access secured parts of the lab, including Nathan's android room.
In the end, up on the main floor of the house, after leaving Caleb locked in the lab, she puts her palm on the pad, shuts down the generator, and then leaves. She LET Caleb out (or, ya, know, at least gave him the chance to escape). We know, from the narrative, that the generator will re-activate, meaning Caleb will be able to call for help eventually.
The narrative didn't state outright but, no, it's obvious she's not an emotionless killing machine, nor did she leave Caleb to die.
@@imetacrab yes it seems like there are at least two versions of it. I remember watching the one you described long time ago. This week, though, when i decided to rewatch the movie it seems like i came across the other version in which he didn't break the door. Not sure whether Ava "put her palm on the pad, shut down the generator and then left" in this one or not but it might be. I have to check it one more time 🤔🤔
@@imetacrab Odd. I t was definitely in the theatrical cut I watched. I'm watching "Ex Machina (10/10) Movie CLIP - Ava is Free (2015) HD" and there's a part where she's walking upstairs to the main part of the house and there's a few seconds cut out wherein she puts her palm on one of the pads and shuts the generator down. It was in the theatrical cut, at least the one I watched when the movie came out.
I saw this once, and my first impression was that Eva DID have emotions, but was ALSO manipulating Caleb from the start. I took Kyoko's cry for help, but I saw it more passively, not as a direct "take me with you," but as a general "someone needs to do something, look at this horror." I figured Eva was sincerely longing for life, but was kind of cold and knew Caleb saw her as a prize more than a person, and that was enough for her to decide he wasn't worth saving. Or that she didn't want anyone who knew about her life who could expose her in the world. I did think she felt sorry for Kyoko at the end, but that little "who are you scene" REALLY slipped by me, because I figured they would be talking about Nathan, not Caleb. So that was a piece of the puzzle that I casually discarded when it didn't seem to lead to anything, or it led to talking about security tech and escape routes or something. I think the last 3 words of that sentence really rub me the wrong way and that if they hadn't been there I might not have realized the problem with it. She wasn't manipulating him "as Nathan suggested" in my reading, but manipulating him in a different way that's more driven by self-worth and whether she can trust someone who's obviously helping her because he wants to be with her.
It was a very detached first viewing, but I think if I had seen it again I might have been much closer to the details you shared here. Not just that Caleb objectified her, but that her attainability was as something to control instead of just to be appreciated by.
"Nathan is arrogant, domineering, manipulative, and he has an enormous God complex."
So, the villain of this story is a Reddit mod?
yeah except he lifts
where or rather who are the trolls, the sea of scum that created the personality?
Finally it's here. *YES*
*ruclips.net/video/mCfYi7634rU/видео.html*
No Reddit mod looks like Oscar Isaac
Thank you!!! I love this video. I can’t believe so many people rejected this interpretation for so long.
I originally interpreted the ending differently, I _did_ think Ava was manipulating Caleb from the very beginning but I _never_ thought that was meant to indicate she was evil, selfish or emotionless, just that Caleb (and I'm sure much of the audience, including me) had misunderstood that, from her perspective, Caleb was just a colleague of her monstrous captor that she could use as a means of escape.
I didn't think of Caleb as a particularly bad guy, just that this was something of a tragic misunderstanding; that Ava...actually maybe "misunderstanding" isn't quite the right word...it's more that Ava, correctly from her point of view given her experiences, saw Caleb as little different from Nathan; another guy testing her and viewing her as an object, which he unquestionably _is_ doing initially until her seduction convinces him to save her. I viewed the tragedy as being that, while she had no way of knowing this and she's in no way at fault, if she had been sincere with Caleb from the start about everything, just frankly telling him during the blackouts her real feelings and desire to escape, Caleb is a nice enough guy that he still would've helped her. We the audience have seen enough of Caleb to know he seems like a good natured enough guy that he'd help Ava once he knows she's actually a person with real feelings _regardless_ of whether he thinks he can score a robot girlfriend out of it, but Ava has no reason to know or believe that and just views him as Nathan's naive underling, falling for her carefully considered charms and who wouldn't even consider helping her if she wasn't acting romantically interested in him.
Obviously your analysis of the situation with Kyoko is causing me to reconsider my interpretation. It looks like I made the same mistake as Caleb and just thoughtlessly wasn't considering Kyoko as a person in need of saving the same way Ava is, and really, shame on me for that. I feel like... in my and Caleb's _slight_ defence, Kyoko's lack of speech and general communication plus her strange, stilted behaviour and expressionlessness does make it easy to interpret her as not being conscious and "alive" in the same way Ava is. Oh my god, just writing this out has made me feel rather disgusted with myself, especially as an autistic person myself, I realise how much that sounded like a cruel dismissal of non-verbal, neurodivergent and otherwise "odd" seeming people, that's so bad, I apologise... That's the thing though, I think Caleb would think the same way if this were pointed out to him, I don't think his lack of care about saving Kyoko was a cruel, conscious choice and dismissal, just a careless lack of thought about whether she might be more cognizant and "human" than he's recognised. That doesn't make his ignoring her _OK_ by any means, I just don't think I have quite as negative a perception of him as a person as you do. I think, given the stressful, high pressure situation he was in trying to save _one_ person from Nathan's fortress makes his lack of thought or consideration for Kyoko... _understandable,_ even if it's reprehensible if you think about it, which, as I said, I like to think even he would recognise and accept if you pointed it out to him. That is, if Ava had said to Caleb "we need to save Kyoko too, even though she can't speak she's a person just like me" I don't think he would've objected, and not just because of his infatuation with Ava.
I'm still not 100% sure about all this, I'll need to watch the film again with your take in mind. One problem with having had my initial interpretation is, of course, that, given I've seen the film multiple times, on subsequent viewings my perception of Ava was always that she was being disingenuous with Caleb throughout, which is going to be a difficult notion to shake off...
This is almost exactly my opinion on both the film and this video. Caleb is the character that the audience is supposed to project themselves into, and for the duration of the entire movie, Caleb is trying to pass either Nathan or Ava's tests. At the beginning of the film, it's very clearly established that Kyoko will do just about anything Nathan wants her to do, and because Caleb distrusts Nathan, I believe this distrust naturally is shared in regards to Kyoko. As you said, it's difficult for the audience to determine just how much humanity Kyoko actually has, which is left ambiguous until the end for dramatic effect. Unlike neurodivergences in humans, which never reduce the capacity for emotion or free will, the sapience of any hypothetical robot isn't always apparent. You shouldn't feel disgusting for thinking that because Kyoko was non-verbal and entirely compliant, that she may not be as human as Ava. Real people could never be made to be less human because of a difference in their brains, but you know this. The film conditions us into thinking she's some kind of human-shaped appliance, and her peeling back her skin when confronting Caleb appears to him (and to a large number of the audience) less like a cry for help and more like a confirmation that her entire existence is fully engineered and pre-determined, and Caleb now feels validated in choosing to abandon her. As much as I don't believe Ava is some evil AI Terminator, I also don't believe Caleb is some disgusting chauvinist pig who ignores Kyoko because she's not attractive to him. Caleb only realizes Kyoko's true sapience when she helps kill Nathan, and not at any real point prior, as literally any of that could've just been Nathan's programming. I concur with a lot of these other comments when referring to Ava's motivations for abandoning Caleb, in that she just doesn't want to be tied down by him. Her experiences being abused by Nathan have led her to believe that true freedom can only be achieved when there's no one who needs anything from you or who has the power to make you do things you don't want to. Was it harsh? Yes, but I think there's a ton of nuance to her reasoning.
TLDR: I disagree with Shaun on this one, but he raises some interesting points. I just think we should be giving Caleb the benefit of the doubt here because....y'know.....everyone was manipulating him in 4 different dimensions, meaning he probably couldn't just infer that he was supposed to save Kyoko without being explicitly told.
@@PsychicRadroach neurodivergence can reduce the capacity for emotion (mania, ASD, depression) and free will (OCD, ASD, depression, ADHD).
@@anthonynorman7545 I meant reduce completely. No one is fully emotionless or is completely absent of free will. That kind of stuff can be impaired, of course, but everyone has it. Sorry I didn't make this clearer.
@@PsychicRadroach I can't say for caleb's perspective, but the audience sees obvious signs of trauma and anger and a sense of irony on Kyoko's part.
@@anthonynorman7545 Yeah, you're almost certainly right about the audience's perspective. The film does a good job at sidelining Kyoko and making the audience not think about her, making the abuse in the film more insidious in that regard. I think Caleb and many in the audience (including high school me) hand-waved away that the abuse mattered at all when it's revealed that she's a robot, since surely he didn't program her to be fully sapient if he was gonna treat her like that, a belief which ultimately is proven wrong again when she attacks him. I guess I was always just so blindsided by the scene where the two of them dance together, since surely there must've been some part of Kyoko that didn't fully hate Nathan. I'm willing to admit I'm probably not as good at helping those with trauma as I'd like to be, and this avenue of looking at this movie I really like is a good exercise in broadening my perspective and realizing serious warning signs sooner.
My initial interpretation of why she leaves Caleb behind was that to be truly free, she has to keep her secret. With the last look on the two "bodies" she realizes that Caleb is now the only witness left and she decides on the spot (but quite rationally) that she'd rather not take any risks on her last few steps to freedom. Given that Nathan was her only point of reference up to then, I would forgive her a general mistrust against humankind (y'know, we are the real monsters). But now it all makes sense.
Yep. This is the actual reason. Had Caleb left with her, there would always be a threat to her existence. He would force her to be cautious, even if he was well-intentioned. But there's always the possibility that he wants to use her as a template to create more like her, which again would expose her to other malicious agents. "Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead". This isn't revenge for Kyoko, it's pragmatic survival.
@@TheGavrael this is possibly the worst reading of the movie i have ever seen
@@supertrollfaxnoprinter3329 then you must not get out much because it’s a fairly common one.
After watching your video, I went to watch a clip of the ending scene on youtube and found this lovely comment about Ava's decision:
"In time you will learn that "she" really is no different than any other woman, once your utility to her has ended."
Obviously, I'm not accusing everyone who came to the mainstream conclusion of being as pathetically misogynistic as this guy, but reading such a stupid comment made me think about how much underlying misogyny and lack of empathy for female characters played into so many people coming to the betrayal/manipulation conclusion. Makes you really think about if some people would interpret the ending differently if the androids were male.
Not some, a lot of people.
@@taranullius9221 I'd say the majority.
Nobody would be arguing that Celene deserved to be starved to death because her love for Avon wasn't sufficiently pure, that's for sure.
I think its because the movie is actually misogynistic. Sure the plot is feminist. But the plot points that turn the misogynistic movie( basically an excuse to make a sex bot fantasy) were just added to avoid the movie being attacked as misogynistic. The camera in 90% of the movie makes this clear and the acting at the end undercuts the overt feminist plot. So of course people miss the plot and misunderstand it. It is intentional by the movie makers as its not the real point of the movie. Oddly the people that missed the plot understant the point of the movie better than the people who paid attention.
@@peterisawesomeplease I disagree, I don’t think the intention was to make a ‘sex bot fantasy’ at all
I had to watch Ex Machina as part of a computer science ethics class and let me tell you, ethics professors are the worst people you could possibly get to teach ethics, let alone film analysis. Anyway we basically had to come at the analysis from a "should you program a general AI which may choose its own goals and then release it on the world?" and that is... a bad angle to take with this movie. I didn't have nearly enough time, being a busy student and all, to analyze it properly from a more human angle and voice an opposition to the way the questions were framed, but the whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth.
That is actually the angle Garland himself seemed to have in making the movie. Nathan's actual objective was to build an AI which would surpass humanity.
Instead of simply changing the Wikipedia article like anyone can, this madman made nearly 19 minutes of content out of it. Respect to the grind.
To be fair, it would be guaranteed to be immediately re-edited
@@johnmartinez7440 instead Shaun made a future Wikipedia citation
i feel pretty shitty about myself that i never considered kyoko's sapience. at all.
i saw this as a story about the divergence in values between artificial and human consciousness. i considered ava's escape moral, and just assumed she considered humanity a risk, and wanted to exist without the danger of anyone knowing her secret.
thanks for this. you've made my experience of the film more enriching, and have opened up some circuits in my brain that needed it.