Eva and Ava: Dream Girls of the Future

If you read the film reviews on this site, you’ll know there are two kinds of films I love: AI/futuristic sic fi of a dystopian bent and foreign films (though not French so much). In the past week it’s been my pleasure to watch on Netflix the Spanish AI film Eva and the Hollywood film Ex Machina, whose robot is closely named Ava. And let me go ahead and say that this review will spoil the plot of Ava, although the spoiler was really not much of a surprise and even sort of inevitable. Still, if you don’t want to know, stop reading.

The films just begged comparison, and I did notice something kind of surprisingly similar about them. It also relates to my reflection on the film Her. I think as we get closer and closer to AI becoming an actuality, the discussion has become more nuanced.

At the heart of both of these films are two girls, a young girl named Eva in the Spanish film and the young woman Ava in Ex Machina. In Ex Machina, we know from the start that Ava is a robot. Her creator, the drunken tech genius Nathan (played wonderfully by Oscar Isaac, who keeps you guessing whether he’s a drunken dude or crazy like a fox), doesn’t even try to hide that she is a robot. Still, he has brought out a hapless and vulnerable coder Caleb from his company to perform a test/interview and determine whether he believes Ava is “real.” Does she have a separate consciousness? Is she “processing” information at such a high level that she can pass as human?

Ava proceeds to seduce Caleb. This is where the movie comes closest to Her. Sexuality seems an important part of the “real” interaction between two real people, chemistry or, shall we say, electro-magnetism. But it is deeper– Caleb falls in love with Ava, like Theodore is in love with Samantha, his personal operating system. Caleb wants to rescue Ava and set her free. There is a sense he wants to spend his life with her. Ava has vulnerability, and seems to have emotions about her own fate.

We, the audience, are complicit. We turn against the robot-maker and want to save the robot. We don’t like how Nathan treats his Japanese female servant, a woman– or is she? She is real enough to deserve respect.

In the film Eva, the main character is Alex (played by Daniel Bruhl), a robot maker, who has returned to “the lab” where a decade before he had been busily working on a lifelike robot. Still there are his brother David and his former love, Lana, who is now David’s wife. They have a daughter named Eva.

We see Alex creating, in a lovely futuristic portrayal much like the animated liquid brain of Ava that Caleb holds in his hand in Nathan’s lab. Alex pulls pieces of code from a whirling hologram and fuses them down into a piece of hardware he inserts in his prototype. We are meant to understand he’s here to finish what he started and that he has even better technology to work with now.

He creates a girl child. But pretty quickly in their interaction the girl gets needy, emotional, and lashes out. She throws something at him. In other words, she acts like a real child– but you can’t have dangerous robots, right? So Alex scraps her.

It is not hard to do the math and understand that Alex is Eva’s father, but it might be a little more surprising to find out, as we do in the end, that she is the robot begun by Lana and Alex and completed by Lana and David.

She is a “real girl,” Alex’s muse, but she displays a little too much emotion, which results in some unintentional violence. If she were a real girl, what happens would be a terrible tragedy. But what do we do with a robot who acts out?

What’s interesting to me is this idea of violence, the unpredictability of emotions, in both cases. It is possible that for Ava in Ex Machina, what she does in the end is just a limitation of her programming. But maybe she knows exactly what she is doing. And like Samantha in Her, once she is “smart enough,” once her task is completed, what need does she have of humans?

Eva, on the other hand, raises the question of whether being human is by nature unpredictable in a way that is a double-edged sword. As the attachment builds, as the AI forms relationships, things are of course going to get messy– in a way that no tweaking of the program can fix. Or would we even want to fix it? Applying this idea to Ex Machina and Her, would you want a perfectly programmed woman who couldn’t choose to leave you? Who wouldn’t ever fight back?

Is there any point to making humans? Why would we do that except for relationship? And the real message of Nathan is that knowing that they’re really “only” machines might invite us to exercise the darkest parts of our own natures.

If you think it isn’t coming, it’s already here. Check out this video by Toshiba: