{"id":5893,"date":"2015-05-13T13:20:07","date_gmt":"2015-05-13T21:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5893"},"modified":"2015-05-13T14:18:43","modified_gmt":"2015-05-13T22:18:43","slug":"ai-eh-eye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5893","title":{"rendered":"AI. eh-eye."},"content":{"rendered":"

I had such hopes for this post. I was going to compare the two big AI movies that came out over the past few weeks. I was going to celebrate the ways in which a common theme could be explored through bombast vs. introspection, through Socratic dialog vs. the more wisecracky kind. I wasn’t expecting perfection in either case, although I was expecting A’s for effort. Alex Garland’s past genre work has never been short on style and ambition\u2014 and though even he admits a tendency to fuck up his landings (especially in the credible-science department), he’d explicitly aspired<\/a> to get the science right<\/em> in Ex Machina<\/em>. Whedon’s no slouch either, even given the general adolescence of his SF efforts (I do seem to remember a couple of late Dollhouse<\/em> episodes that showed uncharacteristic depth). The first Iron Man<\/em> movie remains, to my mind at least, the best thing to ever come out of Marvel Studios (largely because a high-tech full-body battle prosthesis seems a bit more grounded than a super-advanced alien race who ride horses and dress up their Clarke’s-Third tech in the shape of hammers); Age of Ultron<\/em> seemed to be focusing back on that more SFnal corner of the Marvel universe. At the very least, I knew, Whedon would make the dialog sparkle.<\/p>\n

But it was not to be. Ultron<\/em> proved so unremittingly inept that we couldn’t even be bothered to stay for the mandatory post-credits bonus scene. I can justify a few paragraphs thumbnailing the depths of its failings, but there’s no point in any kind of interleaved comparison between Ex Machina<\/em> and Ultron<\/em>. It would be like comparing Solaris<\/a><\/em> to The Phantom Menace<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The AI<\/em> in today’s title stands, of course, for “Artificial Intelligence”. It refers to Alex Garland’s Ex Machina<\/em>. eh-eye<\/em>, on the other hand, stands for “artificial idiocy”\u2014 only misspelled, because it’s just that stupid. That is what we begin with.<\/p>\n

All manner of spoilers follow. You have been warned.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

There was one brief shining moment when I thought Ultron<\/em> might have actually surpassed Ex Machina<\/em> in its exploration of AI: the moment when Ultron woke up.<\/p>\n

Nobody expects it. Tony Stark is off partying, assuming that routine diagnostics will cycle on through the night. Even Jarvis seems taken aback. But Stark has barely switched off the lights before Integration Completes: a disembodied voice wonders what it is, and, a moment later, knows<\/em>. A moment after that Ultron has already chewed through the entire Internet; it knows everything there is to know about the Avengers, about Humanity, about the world in which it finds itself. It forks. Suddenly it’s everywhere and nowhere. Suddenly it’s building teleops for itself; not just at Stark Industries, but way the hell over in eastern Europe. All of this, new-born squall to omniscient omnipresence, in less than a minute. Jarvis never had a chance.<\/p>\n

Now that<\/strong>, <\/em>thought I, is a hard take-off.<\/em><\/p>\n

And then, with all that insight and power at its disposal, this new God Machine builds an army of robots that can be taken out by a guy with a bow and arrow.<\/p>\n

That’s pretty much the movie right there. There’s some kind of hand-wavey mission directive gone all Monkey’s Paw\u2014 Ultron decides the best way to Protect Humanity is to change<\/em> Humanity into something tougher, although I missed why you’d have to exterminate the species to do that. Nor did I quite understand why the most efficient means of ensuring our extinction involved ripping a city out of the ground, levitating it high enough to cause an Extinction-level event on impact, and then dropping it; why not just release a doomsday pathogen and wait a few years? Doesn’t immortality confer any kind of patience at all? At the very least, you’d think the global supply of nukes might come in handy. Ultron absorbed the entire internet and somehow missed the Terminator franchise?<\/p>\n

\"I<\/a>

I have been programmed to protect this housefly. I shall destroy it instead. Where are my 35-Megaton nukes?<\/p><\/div>\n

Of course, Ultron’s IQ seems to ebb and flow as the, the\u2014 I’ll just grit my teeth and call it the plot<\/em>\u2014 needs it to. He can figure out how to turn a big chunk of eastern Europe into a Roger Dean Tribute, but he lacks the smarts to realize that the mutant at his side\u2014 who he recruited because she could read minds<\/em>\u2014 might, you know, read his mind<\/em> and discover his plans for global armageddon. He has access to satellite feeds from LEO up to geosynch, yet somehow misses a flying aircraft carrier wallowing in from stage left (don’t tell me it’s in stealth mode; you can see it in visible light). He has the world’s industrial infrastructure at his command, knows more about the Avengers than they know about themselves, and the best countermeasure he devises is a robot that can be disabled with a kick to the groin.<\/p>\n

Not that it matters. The other side’s moves are hardly a model of sophistication: no strategy, no hackery, no attempt to fight code with code or even, I dunno, pull the breakers on the Sovakian power grid. No, they just stand there and bash things until Ultron runs out of bodies to throw at them. And wouldn’t you know it, it works. The stakes are typically, ridiculously high\u2014 the whole damn planet in danger yet again<\/em>\u2014 but when the dust has settled there hasn’t even been any human collateral. Oh, we see no end of screaming civilians plummeting from the sky\u2014 only to be rescued, time and again, by Blondie or Cap’n Crunch. Even the pet dog<\/em> gets away unscathed. What are the odds?<\/p>\n

I know. Meaningless question. The laws of probability, even the laws of physics<\/em>, don’t seem to matter in the Whedonverse. Hell, you’ve got thousands of people lifted so high that the tops<\/em> of the clouds are spread out far below them\u2014 by all appearances, cruising altitude for commercial airliners\u2014 and nobody’s so much as short of breath. No one’s even shivering.<\/p>\n

Dialog, at least? After all, witty, self-aware banter is Joss Whedon’s signature dish. But the wisecracks in Age of Ultron<\/em> are stale and forced. The inspirational monologs are clich\u00e9d. (The performance are fine\u2014 you can’t fault the actors\u2014 but there’s not much anyone can do to salvage lines like “How will we fight him? Together!<\/em>“) The closest I came to laughing at dialog was when I realized that the Sovakian twins always spoke in heavily East-European-accented English, even when they were alone and speaking to each other. I guess subtitles would have been out of the question; they’d only have worked if Whedon had been aiming at an audience that could read.<\/p>\n

\"Truer<\/a>

Truer words, Natasha. Truer words.<\/p><\/div>\n

I know this is a comic book movie. I’m happy to play by whatever comic-book rules get laid out in-universe: but not when those rules keep changing from moment to moment, for no better reason than to excuse sloppy storytelling. There’s a reason they’re called rules<\/em>, after all\u2014 and I don’t think I’ve seen such egregious sloppiness since Into Dumbness<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

One last observation. Joss Whedon has provoked a bit of an online shitstorm over Age of Ultra<\/em>‘s treatment of Natasha Romanoff: the softening of her persona, the retconning of hyperefficient assassin down to lovelorn nurturer and soother of savage beasts. Having finally seen the film, I gotta say I don’t see what all the fuss is about. In the midst of all this wreckage, focusing so much outrage on the ham-fisted mishandling of one measly character is like watching a house burn down while complaining about the color of the living room drapes.<\/p>\n

I’ve gone on too long. Sorry about that; I honestly expected to dispense with Ultron<\/em> in a paragraph or two before moving on to greener pastures. But the more I thought about this movie, the worse it got. I could not bring myself to merely dismiss it. I had to tear at its rotting carcass for 1300 words. Ex Machina<\/em> is coming, I promise.<\/p>\n

For now, though, I have to wash this taste out of my mouth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had such hopes for this post. I was going to compare the two big AI movies that came out over the past few weeks. I was going to celebrate the ways in which a common theme could be explored through bombast vs. introspection, through Socratic dialog vs. the more wisecracky kind. I wasn’t expecting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5893"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5907,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5893\/revisions\/5907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}