6/19/2023 0 Comments Deus ex machina meaningHe would have taken the replacement of Ava with a new model as casually as Nathan did. If Ava hadn’t presented herself as such, then perhaps, Caleb would have approached this whole test more scientifically. Meeting with Ava gave him the grandiose sense of being the knight who rescues a damsel in distress. We can’t say that there wasn’t an ulterior motive behind Caleb’s help. Even if Caleb was distracted by her sexuality, he must remember that she is not human. In this way, Nathan had balanced the scales. He knew that he was talking to a machine. The question here is- Had it been a male AI, would Caleb have made the same choice of rescuing him? Or, if Ava wasn’t built to be the kind of girl Caleb liked, if she wasn’t his type, is she didn’t show interest in him, would he still have tried to save her? Yes, Nathan had set Ava’s face according to Caleb, but the rest of her body was a machine and Caleb could see it. The whole plan was to lure the rat, Caleb, to the cheese, Ava. Had Caleb been gay, perhaps, he would have seen a male AI sitting in front of him. Nathan custom-built Ava’s features according to the type of girls Caleb liked. His infatuation with Ava is also justifiable. He was handpicked by Nathan for the test and was merely a lab rat, being led the way Nathan wanted to lead him. It’s true that the cards were set against him from the beginning. Yes, he was good for helping Ava in the rescue, but were his motives really as one-dimensional as his love for Ava? Honestly, I don’t think so. But was everything really so simple with Caleb? He was a good-hearted man who just wanted to help an AI achieve freedom. He was a pawn in the game that Nathan and Ava were playing and was truly the victim in the film. In fact, this single act of Ava’s is what makes us more sympathetic with Caleb. And that’s why when Ava abandons him, trapping him inside Nathan’s isolated house with no chance of getting out, we feel sorry for him. Caleb’s Caseįrom the beginning of the film and till the end, we see Caleb as a well-meaning, good person (at least, he thinks so!) who doesn’t want to hurt anyone and just wants to do the right thing. But, as I said, things aren’t so black-and-white here. But what exactly was the game here? And how did it define, or was defined, by the people who were playing it? Who was the villain and who was the victim in this whole thing? It’d be easier to answer it in a binary way, pointing blame on one character and siding with another. And Ava, who was just a lab rat, turns out to be the winner of the game. Nathan was supposed to be the God, with his AIs and his creations, and, in the end, he is the one lying dead outside the place of his creation, killed by a thing he created. Caleb was supposed to be the rescuer, and he becomes the captive. It is amazing how we see the tables turn. In the beginning, Ava appeared to be the victim, the one who appeared to be under a literal deadline! But, by the end, there was a whole new aspect to her personality. While, at first, everything appears black-and-white in ‘Ex Machina’, it soon becomes clear that the characters are not as linear as we thought them to be. SPOILERS AHEAD! The Villain and the Victim But, Nathan wants Caleb to come face to face with Ava, see that she is a machine, and find out if still, he can see her as someone with a consciousness. In the real Turing Test, the computer and the human who tests him cannot see each other. Nathan reveals to Caleb that the true purpose behind this lottery thing was to get a person who could be a part of the Turing Test in order to determine whether Ava (Alicia Vikander), the AI created by Nathan, can pass it or not. Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) is a coder at a company called Blue Book, and he wins a lottery to visit the secret facility of Nathan Bateman (Oscar Issac), the owner of the company. Before we begin to pull out every thread of the story and understand what it all meant, here’s a quick recap of the film.
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