Ex Machina: attack of the sexy female robots

​​​​Alex Garland's new thrillers, Ex Machina, which opens in UK cinemas today, is not the first film to follow a young man's infatuation with a female robot.

Garland, who wrote The Beach and 28 Days Later, explores the limits of artificial intelligence in a tale of a young computer programmer, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) who is asked to determine whether an attractive android called Ava (Alicia Vikander) has consciousness, and falls in love with her along the way.

The movie raises intriguing questions about consciousness and technology, as well as offering some eye candy in the form of the svelte former ballerina Vikander. As Helen Lewis in the New Statesman notes, "the brave new dawn of artificial intelligence will not kill off our crappy old gender dynamics".

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

But Ex Machina is merely the latest in a long line of films that sugar the philosophical pill with a sexy feminine automaton. It's something of a sci-fi obsession.

Blade Runner

In Ridley Scott's film, Harrison Ford plays a detective who hunts down renegade replicants – and falls for a slinky android (Sean Young), described as 'a basic pleasure model'. Like Ex Machina, the film questions whether machines can have empathy, and what it means to be human, but also revives the femme fatale theme from film noir, where femininity is dangerous and unknowable.

The Stepford Wives

The 1970s novel tells the story of a young woman who begins to suspect that the disturbingly submissive housewives in her idyllic new neighbourhood are really robots created by their husbands. It has been adapted into two films, one in 1975 and another in 2004 starring Nicole Kidman, and the term 'Stepford wife' has become a byword for submissive women. A feminist nightmare, the tale is perhaps less alarming for some men.

Metropolis

In Fritz Lang's early sci-fi classic, mad scientist Rotwang creates a sexy art-deco robot modelled on his lost love, Hel, who also happened to be the mother of the movie's hero Freder. The robot also resembles Freder's love interest, Maria, so when Freder sees the Maria-like robot in the arms of his own father, he is devastated. Freud would have been delighted.

Weird Science

Not the last but probably the least is this 1980s teen sci-fi comedy about a group of geeky teenage boys inspired by the Frankenstein myth, who try to build the perfect woman out of a doll and some electrodes. When the sexy, smart Lisa improbably comes to life she helps the boys find the confidence they need to pursue their human love interests. This far-fetched wish-fulfillment tale became a box office hit, and now there's talk of a remake.

Her

Technically there is no physical robot in Her, Spike Jonze's story of a man who falls for his computer program, but there are parallels with Ex Machina. Joaquin Phoenix plays an introverted man who reluctantly falls for Samantha, the smart, funny, sexy operating system on his computer. We never see a physical embodiment of Samantha, but the voice of Scarlett Johansson does the work of conjuring an attractive female presence and evoking the insecurities she prompts in men.

​​​​