What Does the Title “Ex Machina” Mean?
The first thing that might come to mind for “Ex Machina” viewers is that oft-heard latin saying, deus ex machina. It’s one that’s frequently thrown around by book reviewers and English professors alike to describe contrived plot devices that plop neat solutions into an otherwise messy narrative. It’s a critic’s easiest criticism, a lazy label for lazy writing, and stems from Greek and Roman dramas in which a god would descend upon a scene by means of crane to decide the final outcome.
What does the phrase have to do with, then, a movie ostensibly about a beautiful A.I., her brilliant inventor, and a young lab rat programmer? Maybe the film’s title makes more sense when you turn to its literal translation: deus ex machina, or “god from the machinery.”
A lot can be said (and is said explicitly in the film) about man imitating God in creating human-like artificial intelligence. It’s an accusation rightly levelled at Nathan for harvesting data from all of the world’s smartphone cameras and online searches to create Ava, a machine so human-like that a human falls for her. That’s a level of omniscience on Nathan’s part that even the NSA can’t lay claim on. Oh, wait.
In a way, the title could also refer to the surprising plot twist in the film’s third act. When Ava takes control of her own destiny, the machine takes on the god. When she steps out of her glass prison and into the world and all of its busy traffic intersections, she’s stepping into her own dream, not Nathan’s dream of tech domination or Caleb’s dream of companionship, but her own.