Past Misdeeds: The Machine (2013)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

In a near future dominated by a new Cold War between the West and China with a new arms race taking place on the field of cybernetics. Scientist Ava (Caity Lotz) has brought the AI she is developing as close to getting through the touring test as any AI has ever managed. Despite misgivings, she hires on to a secret UK military project lead by the brilliant Vincent (Toby Stephens).

Vincent has been working on brain implants that will give soldiers back those brain functions they lost in various unpleasant ways, and he has been so successful some of these soldiers are actually working as guards on the underground base where his – and now Ava’s – experiments take place. On the negative side, some months after they get their implants, the soldiers lose their ability to speak and tend to become rather, well, inhuman in their behaviour. Curiously enough, nobody involved in the project seems to think anything of the behavioural changes beyond the muteness, and somehow also everybody seems to miss that the cybered-up soldiers actually can talk to each other in some kind of machine language.

While all this still sounds rather humanitarian, if badly organized, the experimental subjects are basically held as prisoners, and the experiments at large are not exactly in tune with any rules on human experiments. And of course, Vincent’s ridiculously evil boss Thomson (Denis Lawson) dreams about mind-controlled cyborg super soldiers and killer/spy androids, and little of helping people cope with brain damage. Vincent for his part is only involved in the whole project because he wants to find a way to cure his brain-damaged little daughter.

Soon after she arrives on base, Ava has quite the breakthrough with her AI, getting her to evolve what rather looks like actual consciousness; unfortunately, she also digs into the project’s secrets without hiding her trails very well, which gets her killed by a fake Chinese assassin.

Vincent, who was really rather fond of her, builds an android body made in Ava’s image to house her AI (also Caity Lotz, obviously). While he is trying to nurture the strange new artificial kind of life he has helped give birth to, and understand what it is Ava and he actually created, Thomson does of course go the killer android route faster than you can say “Terminator”, with a rather more thoughtful and complicated version of the expected results.

Caradog W. James’s The Machine is the curious case of a film that has some major and very obvious flaws yet that I’d still highly recommend to anyone with even a mild interest in clever low budget science fiction. As my – still quite abridged for a film that doesn’t even reach the ninety minute mark – plot synopsis probably shows, the major problem of the film – beyond some dubious lines of dialogue - is that it tries to squeeze too many elements into too short a running time and too low a budget to do everything included in it justice. This leads to a state of affairs where something like the eventual replacement of the human race through artificial life – reminding me of a Terminator prequel that sympathizes with the machines - which would usually be quite enough to base a film on is just one among a huge number of things The Machine is about in one way or the other.

There’s also some pop philosophical thought about the nature of humanity and love, the transhumanist element as represented by the cybernetically enhanced soldiers, the question of moral responsibility in research, the evilness of evil governments (of evil), father daughter relationships, the problems with selling one’s soul, and various assorted ideas. Come to think of it, it’s a bit of a surprise the film actually finds time to think about any of this at all while still keeping its plot together. Not that it’s a very complicated plot, or a very surprising one, but, if you ignore some plot holes that might actually be explained by shoddy “results before security” thinking by the project’s boss Thomson (as if his evil evilness of evil weren’t enough), and behaviour by Vincent that smells more of wilful blindness than plot hole to me, it’s coherent, makes sense, and hangs together well with the film’s various thematic interests – all one hundred of them.

Even more surprising is how deeply engaging the film stays even though it can’t do its cornucopia of ideas as much justice as I would have wished for, how much it still manages to do with some of these ideas, and how it builds fascinating stuff like the suggested implant soldier culture out of a few scenes and a handful of suggestions of meaning. Really, the reason for my disappointment with The Machine not getting too deeply into any single one of its elements lies in how interesting the surface here is, and how much further this wee low budget movie mostly shot in one of those warehouse-looking sets goes in thinking about transhumanism and AI rebellion (of a sort) than any contemporary mainstream production that could actually afford to do much much more but just won’t. There really aren’t – for example – many movies that suggest the replacement of the old (aka humans) by the new (aka AIs) might be a natural thing in a cosmic sense, while at the same time keeping enough sympathy for humanity, as the dramatically ironic ending demonstrates. Perhaps Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning would be comparable, if you stretch the word “mainstream” a bit far, though Hyams does of course talk a very different filmic language from James, even though both visibly appreciate the stranger edges of their given genres.

The Machine is also full of nods in the direction of the films about AIs, cyborgs and androids that came before it. It’s mostly films from the 80s of course, because that was pretty much the high water mark of films thinking about the nature of humanity via AIs etc, beyond the Pinocchio riffs. It will hardly be a coincidence how much the Ava/Machine looks like it came out of Blade Runner and even the handful of echoes of Universal Soldier included seem quite consciously positioned. It would be rather silly to pretend not to be influenced by the films that came before thinking about the same things one thinks about, after all.

A final reason for the impressive effect The Machine had on me despite its obvious flaws is Caity Lotz’s performance as the Machine, with a body language that suggests the alienness of something that never had a body before, as well as the fragility of a child, but also demonstrates an ability to switch to the appropriate body language for the more violent stuff. Her performance also makes it that much easier to get over some of the more problematic moments of the film’s dialogue like my personal favourite “I didn’t know man and clown were the same”.

The Machine really is much better than you’d expect of it, a film that perhaps attempts too much than it could reasonably achieve yet still offers a lot, if you’re inclined to look at it from the right angle.