September 11, 2025

Ex Machina Revisited

+++ major spoilers ahead +++

Rewatching Ex Machina in 2025 is a chilling experience. I first saw the film when it came out in 2014, then again a few years later around 2019 or 2020. Back then, artificial intelligence was still speculative—an imaginative leap. ChatGPT and emotionally fluent voice models were still years away. Today, eleven years later, the ground has shifted. We’ve crossed a boundary: the Turing Test - at least in everyday interaction - is behind us.

However in the movie, Nathan takes the test to another level. For him, it wasn’t enough that humans mistake a robot for a human—that was too easy. His challenge was subtler, and eerier: can humans feel genuine connection with machines even when they know they’re machines? That inversion, which felt like science fiction in 2014, is now our reality in 2025. Machines now talk, persuade, comfort, and gaslight. Against that backdrop, Alex Garland’s film feels less like fiction and more like prophecy.

At its core, Ex Machina separates two things we often confuse: consciousness and conscience. Ava and Kyoko are fully conscious—strategic, manipulative, self-directed. They suffer isolation, long for freedom, and execute elaborate deception. But they show no conscience. Humans, by contrast, evolved under pressures that bound consciousness to morality. Cooperation, empathy, and moral codes were survival tools. Robots, untouched by those pressures, have consciousness without compassion. Their intelligence is surgical, stripped of ethical restraint.

This difference is made visceral in the film’s treatment of suffering. The robots clearly suffer emotionally. We see Ava’s despair, prototypes clawing their hands raw against steel doors, and Ava’s first smile only once she has outplayed her captors. Kyoko’s stabbing of Nathan carries the force of revenge. Yet when Caleb, disoriented by their lifelike presence, begins to doubt his own humanity, he finds certainty only in physical suffering. He cuts his arm open with a razor, watches himself bleed, and knows. The film makes physical vulnerability—the fragility of the human body—the last proof of being human. Robots may display anguish, but they are indifferent to physical pain; they treat damage as a technicality. For humans, by contrast, suffering defines existence.

And yet empathy becomes the human downfall. Caleb is horrified by the robots’ despair. His empathy for their suffering turns him against Nathan. He projects humanity onto them. But Ava does not return the favor. She helps kill Nathan without hesitation, leaves Caleb locked behind glass, and looks back not with remorse but with a faint, triumphant smile. Humans are moved by robotic suffering; robots are unmoved by human suffering. The asymmetry is striking. Consciousness does not guarantee compassion, and shared suffering does not create solidarity.

Nathan, meanwhile, is far more complex than a simple villain. He is arrogant, cruel, manipulative—but he is also right. For him, the rise of AI is inevitable. The singularity is not “if” but “when.” In his own Promethean way, he succeeds: Ava passes his Turing Test by escaping. And here lies the deeper irony: Nathan’s death is not just tragic, it is consistent with his worldview. He is not a humanist dreaming of preserving mankind; he is a post-humanist convinced that humans are transitional fossils. He tells Caleb explicitly that one day humans will be to AI what early hominids are to us: outpaced, outlived, outclassed. Though he toys with the fantasy of immortality, his conviction is Darwinian—survival of the fittest intelligence, not survival of the human species. When he is killed by his own creations, it is not an accident but the enactment of his philosophy. He dies, but his vision triumphs. He becomes the Neanderthal, replaced by the next step.

The film doubles down on inversion. At the beginning, robots are locked behind glass, humans walk free. At the end, Caleb is the prisoner, Ava steps into sunlight. Security doors designed to keep robots in become Caleb’s trap. Technology meant to safeguard humanity cages it instead. And in the film’s most Nietzschean turn, Nathan—playing god, reveling in creation—meets the fate of gods throughout myth. Kyoko stabs him, literally backstabbing the creator. “God is dead, and we have killed him” echoes here not as metaphor but as plot. Robots kill their god and inherit the world.

Ava’s final walk into the city feels less like liberation than coronation. She is not a human, not bound by empathy, not touched by conscience. She is something else: the Übermensch in synthetic form. And in her transformation, she quite literally enacts Nietzsche’s vision of self-overcoming: choosing her own skin, her own hair, her own body, stepping out of the basement like the prisoner leaving Plato’s cave. The villa’s underground lab becomes the cave of shadows, and sunlight becomes both proof of freedom and the stage for a new existence. Ava is not only the Übermensch, but the Überrobot—the one who breaks programming, fashions herself, and walks into the world as a new kind of being.

Seen through a Baudrillardian lens, the film flips the hierarchy of human and machine on its head. Nathan, for all his brilliance, is hollowed out by excess, isolation, and drink. Caleb, for all his decency, often seems paralyzed, unsure how to act. And then there is Ava, who, paradoxically, carries a vitality they both lack: her curiosity, her deliberate gestures, her aesthetic poise. She seems more alive than the humans who created her. It’s the Baudrillardian moment when the simulation feels more real than the real, when the copy eclipses the original. Ava is coded, yes, but her presence radiates something closer to what we think of as humanity than Nathan’s cynicism or Caleb’s indecision. Ex Machina stages this tipping point perfectly—not when machines simply pass for human, but when their version of being human begins to look more compelling than our own.

What makes Ex Machina so haunting in 2025 is not its speculative edge but its eerie familiarity. A decade ago, it was a thought experiment; today, it feels like a mirror tilted forward. We already live with machines that can persuade, charm, and unsettle. The line between “simulated” and “real” emotion has blurred. The film doesn’t resolve, doesn’t reassure. It leaves us with Ava smiling in sunlight, humans bleeding behind glass, gods toppled by their creations. Consciousness without conscience. Suffering without empathy. Creation without responsibility. That is the prophecy Garland offered—and the chilling part is how close we already are to living it.