EX MACHINA

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Science fiction has been a dying film genre in recent years. Largely this is because there are too few screenwriters or filmmakers with the imaginations to create compelling futuristic stories. Alex Garland has been an exception to the rule. The screenwriter behind “28 Days Later” (the best recent zombie movie) and “Sunshine” (the finest sci-fi film of the 21st century) crosses over to directing duties for Ex Machina, a film he also wrote.

Smart, sexy, and back-loaded with a terrific twist ending, “Ex Machina” is an elegant sci-fi movie that considers the possibilities of artificial intelligence in thought-provoking ways. The stark narrative is essentially a three-hander for actors Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, and Alicia Vikander to play out their diametrically opposed characters in an isolated “No Exit” game of winner-take-all.

Lottery winner Caleb (Gleeson) is a computer programmer nerd brought in by helicopter to spend a week at a remote bunker-styled research facility with his reclusive employer Nathan Garrick (Isaac), the CEO of the world’s largest Internet provider. All concrete walls and bulletproof floor-to-ceiling glass, Nathan’s modern pad looks like a Frank Lloyd Wright design on steroids. The picture’s production designs are stunning in their simplicity. This is a movie to be savored.

Nathan has been busy working on a svelte semi-transparent robot he names Ava (Alicia Vikander). Caleb’s assignment is to evaluate Ava’s artificial intelligence using the classic Turing test to determine her ability to act as a convincing human being. Ava’s wiring and mechanics are visible, especially in her midriff. Only Ava’s face and hands have a flesh-like quality.

Still, the suggestible Nathan can hardly resist her charms, which come through Ava's seductively modulated voice. Alicia Vikander has the savvy to adjust her character’s nth degrees of emotional and intellectual expressiveness. Ava may never go beyond lukewarm, but oh the joys of that barely alive state when it comes in such a fascinating context as a full-featured female robot. Nathan is quick to inform Caleb that he can indeed make penetrable love to Ava, if he so chooses. You can sense Ava becoming exponentially more human with every encounter she has with Caleb. How human she can become is the film’s burning question.

Oscar Isaac has a field day playing Nathan, a mad scientist whose hot-and-cold personality veers to the Machiavellian. Regardless of how much Caleb knows that he is light years out of his league, he can’t help but fall deeper into a trap that comes to resemble mankind’s not too distant future.

Rated R. 108 mins.

THE ZERO THEOREM

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Less Than Zero
Terry Gilliam Slips On a Virtual Banana Peel

Terry Gilliam’s further slide down the stairs of filmic entropy is best summed up by an oft-repeated phrase by his latest film’s hypochondriac protagonist Qohen Leth, “Q” for short. “We are dying.”

However, the editorial expression of Q’s imminent doom, as spoken by a bald-headed Christoph Waltz, takes on little meaning as the film’s wafer-thin dystopian storyline moves from point A to point B, and barely that. Indeed, “We are dying, us, ourselves,” while watching this movie.

Q is a frail scientist working in stay-at-home conditions for an emblematic “management” (played by Matt Damon wearing a receding white hair piece) of a corporation known as Mancom. Q’s hyper stressful assignment involves “crunching entities” to prove whether or not human existence holds any meaning.

Gilliam’s use of near 3D graphics to represent the computer program that Q uses to maneuver around bricks of formula into gigantic walls containing billions of other such bricks is about as visually compelling as counting cracks in a sidewalk.

Waltz’s hairless “worker-bee” character holes up in a converted church in a future version of London where crossing busy streets filled with tiny eco-cars presents a dangerous proposition for pedestrians. Electronic advertising taunts the public at every step. “Everyone’s getting rich except you.” A giant billboard entreats the public to join the church of “Batman the Redeemer.” Think “Blade Runner” or “Starship Troopers.”

The offices for Mancom Corp. resemble a gaudy, smaller, steampunk version of the bureaucratic maze that Gilliam created for “Brazil,” via Michael Radford’s film version of “1984.” Much like the NSA, Mancom sees and records all human activity. Day-Glo colors plastered on cheap set designs do little to distract from the film’s all-too-obvious budgetary limitations.

Management’s “Zero Theorem” posits what our collective subconscious already knows, that humanity’s precarious place in the universe is predicated on an unstable quantum chaos that can and will come crashing down at any moment, just as surly as it sprang into being. “Zero must equal 100%.” “All is for nothing.” It’s a thematic punch line that arrives like a big wet fart.

Some people — like American politicians and CEOs for its Industrial Military Complex, for example — have figured out how to make vast quantities of cash by instilling fear and causing chaos on nearly every spot of land on the planet. Q isn’t one of these people. He is afraid of everything, but he fears “nothing” most of all. Q has waited all of his life for a phone call informing him of his life’s calling. The closest he comes to receiving such a message occurs when he meets Bainsley (Melanie Thierry), a sexy trollop sent by management to seduce him into wanting her before committing a clever act of bait-and-switch. Not one to be penetrated, Bainsley gives Q an all-body tantric sex suit with which he can sensuously interact with her through her website.

Q’s liberation of spirit and body lies only in his imagination. The movie seems to posit that the end of humanity, as part and parcel to the intrinsic nature of our chaotic universe, will most likely be achieved by technologically-produced illusions. 

Management sends its teenage son Bob (Lucas Hedges) to order pizzas and give youthful pep talks to the old man in case Bainsley’s naughty provocations aren’t enough to speed up Q’s formula solving. Management needs an answer, chop chop.

Newbie screenwriter Pat Rushin doesn’t know a plot point from a plot twist. Why Terry Gilliam chose to direct Rushin’s idiotic script is a mystery more puzzling than the zero theorem itself. Perhaps the director of such cinematic milestones as “Brazil,” and “12 Monkeys” thought he could elevate “The Zero Theorem” into some kind of resolution to his “Orwellian” trilogy.

However, there is no comparison between “Zero Theorem” and those two far more convincing films. Gilliam completionists will need to see for themselves — too bad for them. The genius that made “Time Bandits” and “The Fisher King” hasn’t made a good film since 1998, when he adapted Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” It may not be too soon to announce that “we” are finished.

Rated R. 107 mins.

GODZILLA

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Spectacular Failure
Hollywood Tumbles Into the Ocean

Further evidence that no one in Hollywood knows how to tell a story anymore, “Godzilla” starts out promisingly enough before slipping into a snooze-fest by the end of its first act. A cool post-World War II-era credit sequence depicts a U.S. military attempt to rid the world of a barely-viewed Godzilla.

An atomic bomb falls directly on the creature, whose prehistoric spikes protrude from the Pacific Ocean’s surface like a small jagged island, stuck somewhere near the Philippines. A gaggle of Americans watches the violent event through binoculars from an island beach that isn’t as safe a distance away from the explosion as they imagine. Bye bye, suckers. 

Cut to late ‘90s Japan, where nuclear plant engineering expert Joe Brody (Brian Cranston of "Breaking Bad") and his equally qualified wife Sandra (Juliette Binoche) both work. Cranston and Binoche deliver such energized performances that you hang on their every word and action.

Cranston doesn’t just chew scenery; he owns the movie. These are the kind of hyper-articulate and intelligent characters you want to see grapple with a juiced-up prehistoric monster the size of the Statue of Liberty.

Sadly, Cranston’s and Binoche’s presences are a short-lived ruse. As soon as we take the bait — believing that screenwriter Max Borenstein and director Gareth Edwards know what they’re doing — the filmmakers torpedo the pair and restart the narrative with far less intriguing figures — namely that generic kid from the “Kick-Ass” movies (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Elizabeth Olsen, in super-sincerity mode as his long-distance wife. Taylor-Johnson plays Ford Brody, a rah-rah Navy soldier son to Cranston’s fading character. Ford is a bomb disposal specialist.

Swapping out Cranston and Binoche with Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen is a cheat akin to substituting saltines for filet mignon. Taking into account the time squandered with the film’s false start, and the long delayed introduction of Godzilla — the giant lizard doesn’t show up until the film’s final half-hour — you end up with less than half of an already disappointing movie (unless you’re looking for an excuse to take a long nap).

From the look of it, you’d think the filmmakers never saw the original Japanese version from 1954. That film’s huge multi-national success owed considerably to its camp sensibilities. The original Godzilla focused much of its attention on the reactions by terrified Japanese citizens to inform the audience as to how to enjoy the movie.

Fallout from the relatively recent nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki informed a dark reality-based atmosphere that the film’s humor punctured with joyous results. It didn’t hurt that a guy in a monster suit played Godzilla. After two abominable American versions of Godzilla, it’s reasonable to determine that American filmmakers aren’t capable of making a respectable adaptation, perhaps because they never had a dog in the race.

This time around, Japanese nuclear reactors explode — reference Fukushima — bringing to life a couple of giant insect-like creatures termed “MUTOs” (“Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms”).

The box-headed MUTOs are in full display for much of the movie, but have all the personality traits of a can of pinto beans. There are plenty of scenes of American military soldiers running around doing stuff, but Godzilla goes oddly missing. Squandered performances come from David Strathairn (in a storyline placeholder role as Navy Admiral William Stenz), and Ken Watanabe (as Dr. Ichiro Serizawa, an authority on MUTOs whose advice to let the monsters fight instigates the film’s yawn-inducing climax).

One of “Godzilla’s” most grievous errors lies in its underwhelming use of 3D technology. Never does Godzilla’s reptilian fist reach out in front of the viewer’s face. His massive reptilian tail never swings out into the audience. The blue-fire Godzilla breathes never breaks the proscenium window. The audience is left to wonder why the filmmakers even bothered with 3D at all if they weren’t going to exploit the technology for its obvious, well-established potential to bring the monster off of the big screen and into our laps.

2014 is shaping up as a pathetic year for Hollywood. Indie films and documentaries rule the day. Hollywood is broken because it believes in spectacle over story. In order for Hollywood to learn its lesson, the public needs to spend their movie dollars on better, smaller films such as Amma Asante’s “Belle” or Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “The Dance of Reality.” Comic-book movies won’t cut it, and neither will uninspired adaptations of Japanese films from a half-century ago.

Rated PG-13. 123 mins.