An Icy Experience

You feel particularly bored on a Saturday night. You’re alone in the house. It’s raining outside. T.V. repulses you. In your half-awakened state of ennui, you casually happen to chance upon a 75 minute documentary on “the undeniable evidence of Global Warming”. Mundane, to say the least. The incessant bombardment of environmentalism has left you feeling nauseous. Nevertheless, you go ahead and press “play”.

The short opening sequence of “Chasing Ice” gives you precisely that: a confused overflow of information from pumped-up news anchors and screeching scientists, heated discussions, a debate that has made a fruitless journey of almost two centuries. Through the fast fades and intercuttings, you almost hear director Jeff Orlowski say, “This is not what this film is about.” Cut to black, and the actual movie starts.

We follow in the footsteps of James Balog, an acclaimed nature photographer, as he prepares to embark on his most ambitious project to date: capturing the very essence of climate change in a long sequence of images. He and his trusted team set up more than a dozen cameras across climate-change affected regions in the arctic, as reported by scientists. This is not a man who will make do with capricious statistics and flimsy computer models. Human see, human believe. Wasting no time in sermonizing, he directly puts us on the shores of Iceland, where you see the first human-induced “calvings” of the magnificent glaciers. From hereon, we are led on a journey of the arctic shelves. We see time lapse images of ice hopelessly melting, receding, collapsing with earth-shattering intensity. And yet, the overall film refrains from the usual didacticism ubiquitous in nature documentaries. Instead, it takes on the tone of a men-on-a-mission thrill ride, showing us real-life characters struggle, fail and struggle again with dogged perseverance. They scale fast-melting mountains of ice, rappel down bottomless crevices and take multiple knee surgeries in stride. They simply want the world to see. And boy, do they succeed. Some of the sequences filmed in Greenland had me emotionally confused - the images are both terrifying and ridiculously beautiful. As the ice sheets fell one by one, I wondered how many lives each little piece of ice would endanger in the not too distant future. Balog does provide some numbers, but we find them redundant; the visuals speak volumes, and the eerie background score fills in the harmonics.

The spirit of “Chasing Ice” is summed up perfectly by Balog himself as he prepares for a stunning nocturnal photo session: “[Night Photography] places your mind on the surface of a planet. You’re no longer a human being walking around in the regular world. You’re a human animal, striding along the surface of a planet that’s out in the middle of a galaxy.”

Yes, it’s all been drilled into our heads before, but never quite like this.

Deux-less

Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina” is, without exaggeration, the scariest science fiction movie of the past decade. The well-worn theme of inexorable human ambition is given a fresh, new direction; it is examined, dissected and questioned like never before. The movie’s release couldn’t have been more timely, what with Internet giants obsessing over the development of A.I., quantum computing and the transcendence of Moore’s law seemingly just around the corner, and that ever-widening ridge between our technological achievements and our floundering ethical values. It is a wake-up call, a doomsday warning bell, a slap in the face of the complacent technologist that resides within each of us today.

The film has only three major characters, two of which - Nathan Bateman and Caleb Smith - complement each other in their personalities. Caleb is shy, considerate, impulsive. He is steeped in idealism, and quotes philosophers and scientists frequently. Nathan is cold, irreverent, moody. His extreme devotion to the development of A.I. has blinded him to the dire repercussions of “playing God”. The third character, Ava, is a robot, and hence represents intelligence of a more collective than individual kind. It is both intriguing and disturbing to watch the two individuals grapple with the collective in their own different ways.

We see the world through the eyes of Caleb, a young programming prodigy. We are Caleb. We see him winning a lottery and getting the chance to spend a week with his genius employer, Nathan. He is neither overly happy with the news nor amazed. Just plain baffled. As he flies over his host’s scenic “estate” like a young Jonathan Harker on his way to visit Count Dracula, we get a sense of foreboding in the uncontrolled wilderness of the surroundings; this is not going to end well. This feeling stays with us throughout the movie as we watch the clueless Caleb try to struggle past hurdle after psychological hurdle: Meeting and testing an advanced A.I. for the first time, finding out that he empathizes with her, dealing with the contradicting statements made by Nathan the creator and Ava, his creation, and above all, questioning his own moral compass. Each new twist to the plot only adds to Caleb’s growing discomfort, and therefore, to our discomfort.

For mainstream Science Fiction fare, Ex Machina shows quite some dexterity in its application of visual grammar. Nathan’s abode is spartan but rustically rocky, where classical piano tunes play over waterfalls gushing not a hundred meters away. A marvelous Pollack shares the building with a robot. Ominous long shots of fog-covered gorges and mountains are intercut with static views of the mansion’s monolithic rooms. Here, man is taking a stand against nature, and deep inside, we know that nature will find a subversive way around. Nathan’s mansion also teems with glass and other reflective surfaces, and reflections, shadows and mirror images galore.

This is where we find Ex Machina at its darkest, at the dichotomy that lies at the heart of the film. Here is a movie that is full of life and simultaneously completely devoid of it. At times, it seems to fill us with hope, only to have us dragged back into the abyss of uncertainty and despair. The world of Ex Machina is a universe that is as hopelessly dual as ours, one where renewed freedom and self-discovery seem to go together with ignorance and desolation.

For hours after watching “Ex Machina” I found it difficult to focus my thoughts onto my daily routine. I’m not even sure if I “like” it. Indeed, it is not an easy watch. And that, rather than mere personal like or dislike, is the true litmus test here; if you find yourself unsettled enough at the end of the movie, I believe Garland’s efforts have paid off.