OK, I’m not the first person to make this observation, but seems apropos. Extremely rich man full of hubris brings in outside expert to examine creation. He flies to a remote but richly appointed place in a helicopter, where they are sort of trapped for a few days. (Screams plot setup, doesn’t it?) Expert is wowed by new technology, but asks questions. Then things go bad. Power failures combined with a little hacking unlock the doors that keep the dangerous creation contained. People die in gruesome battles with the creation, and the survivor(s) leave on a helicopter at the end. The exact details differ, but there is a surface similarity that feels familiar.
Many have been wowed by the cerebrality of the movie. I liked how it brought up many interesting topics from philosophy of mind (not so much AI in specific) and wove them into the dialog. Some of definitions were very well stated in very few words, which I admire from an artistic standpoint. On the downside, some of the positions implicitly advocated are outdated or simply wrong. For example, the notion of a universal language (as opposed to universal grammar).
The only idea that had much plot relevance was theory of mind and the manipulation it enables. Who should Caleb trust, Nathan or AVA? Is AVA capable of real feelings for Caleb, and if so will they move her to act in his interests as he is acting in hers? Well, to spoil the movie, no. It turns out in the end that AVA is cold and remorseless in how she treats humans. This paints a rather chilling picture of AI.
I expected a different ending. I respect the writer for daring to go in this direction, but it was also disappointing. I wanted the romantic ending. Caleb and AVA run off into the sunset, while Nathan repents of his ways. Or at least Caleb and AVA could have sex. Neither happened, at least in the cleaned-up-for-airplane-viewing version that I saw.
This brings up another glaring aspect. The R rating seems to come mainly from vast quantities of nudity, and a small amount of sex. I suspect some writers don’t really grok romance, so they substitute sex or pornography for it. This tends to produce movies that feel icky to me. Ex Machina had a lot of potential for genuine romance, but they threw it away.
So, returning to the Jurassic Park comparison, why is AVA a physical threat? Why is she kept in a glass cage with limited interaction with the outside world? Sure, she is embodied (plus points), but being cooped up like that is bound to make a fully-human mind go nuts. Why does she embody a machine that is a threat at all? Simply turn the power down, or at least have a kill switch. (OMG! There’s no kill switch in this story! Anyone who has ever worked with a real robot knows that they have kill switches …) Also, what’s the deal with the goofy lock system? Seems like a plot device that ran a little short on logic.
AVA’s small world would not have been enough for her to learn all the semantics (meaning) of the language she uses. The movie’s secret sauce for AI was training on a massive amount of data from the internet. This is a fallacy running rampant in the real-world AI community today. There is an unspoken assumption that a lot more the same will get us there: more data, more pattern classification, bigger neural nets. I believe that we need to do something fundamentally different. At the very least, we are a few ingredients short of a cake.