We’re light-years from film’s early depictions of artificial intelligence: HAL 9000, the monotone and murderous computer from2001: A Space Odyssey, seems futile; C-3PO, the clunky but clutch sidekick in theStar Warsfranchise, seems comically rudimentary. Filmmakers have treated the division between human and artificial intelligence as absolute. InSteven Spielberg’sA.I. Artificial Intelligence(2001), David (Haley Joel Osment) is a new type of robot that looks like a human boy, feels like a human boy, and is programmed to love like a human boy. His ‘mother’ receives him as a gift as her own son remains in suspended animation. But David is not a human boy: his “adoptive” mother initially resists him, repulsed; and when his human brother returns home after his miraculous recovery from a chronic illness, he’s ousted from his family. Years and years later, David is still alive, still a boy — and the human mother he once loved so fervently is long dead. He outlasts humanity, he survives an apocalypse, but he ends up alone. A genetic replica of his mother can be recreated, but can only survive to visit him for a single day. Spielberg seems to suggest there is a chasm here that cannot be crossed; in other words, human and machine cannot coexist in perpetuity.
This notion is frightening — and as technology improves, hyperreal artificial life can seem like a threat to humanity, not an asset.Ex Machinaexplores this idea with a rather nihilistic attitude, its plot undergirded by a firm belief in a social hierarchy that places humans on top. The sense of dread, then, stems from the potential for its reversal. The story is a familiar one, following the Frankenstein arc: the creation comes to life — real life, autonomous life — and starts to call the shots. At the end of the movie, Ava (Alicia Vikander) tricks her creator (Oscar Isaac), kills him, and escapes, leaving the unwitting Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) trapped. The message is clear: if we can’t control our creations, they become monsters.
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Science fiction films have lingered in this uncanny valley, where it’s difficult to distinguish between human and machine and the existential anxiety is palpable. ButKogonada’s sophomore filmAfter Yangmakes bold new strides, suggesting not only that the border between human and nonhuman is permeable, but that the cross-pollination between man and machine can be generative. InAfter Yang, techno-sapiens, or technos, are common features, made by a company fittingly called “Brothers & Sisters.” Clones are apparently unremarkable, too, though the movie only addresses them in passing. That an individual might be human, replicated human, or robot is a given that the movie doesn’t interrogate head-on — it’s more concerned with collapsing divisions than delineating them.
The movie’s titular techno, Yang (Justin H. Min), seems like an amalgamation of his cinematic forebears, both physically human and apparently emotionally intelligent — it’s his internal capabilities that set him apart. Equipped with a “memory bank,” Yang has a private, interior world. He is not simply hardwired — he also accumulates anecdotes and fragments of images from his life. Yang’s memories are just five seconds long each, and he can only save one per day. The manner in which Yang’s memories are captured and stored evokes the mechanisms of human memory: sporadic snapshots assembled in a loose collage. Like Yang’s, human memory is far from perfect, retained in random snippets with disrupted chronologies.
The surprise of Yang’s memory makes it a pivotal element of the story. At first, Jake (Colin Farrell) and his family have no idea that Yang has any kind of organic memory. But when Yang’s core unexpectedly fails, Jake takes the techno to Russ (Ritchie Coster), a back-alley repairman. Russ assesses the defunct Yang and suspects he carries a kind of spyware, that he’s dangerous, a pawn. He should be scrapped. The man is unsure how — or unwilling — to repair Yang. Desperate for a better solution and a second opinion, Jake brings Yang’s “spyware” to a techno-sapien museum specialist, Cleo (Sarita Choudhury). She examines it and is delighted with the discovery: it’s actually a memory bank, an unusual feature for a techno. Cleo emphasizes how it could be the key to discovering new information about their functionality.
Russ and Cleo represent two sides of the same coin: on one hand, the fear of something we don’t understand, the side that the genre has examined in-depth; on the other hand, the joy of connection. This side is Kogonada’s revelation. Yang’s original purpose was to connect Jake and Lyra’s (Jodie Turner-Smith) adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) to her Chinese heritage, but there’s more to him than anyone knew. Cleo, for one, sees this as exciting, not threatening. Perhaps life in this hybrid future is not a zero-sum game. The notions of mutual benefit and inclusivity permeate the movie, which leaves binary relationships behind and challenges the accepted hierarchy between man and machine. Yang’s essential humanity is illustrated primarily through his close relationship with Mika. When Yang shuts down, Mika wants to stay home from school — she wants to be with her brother. She asks about him repeatedly, and the tenor of these moments is reminiscent of the dynamic between any child and a seriously sick sibling. Jake and Lyra are somewhat sympathetic, but they seem more impatient than understanding. They try to placate Mika with bribes. They want things back to normal. Initially, it seems like they’ve lost a tool, not a child.
That’s the central conundrum of Yang’s humanity: a tool is replaceable, but a child — a brother — is not. After Yang shuts down, Jake and Lyra seem unsure which he really is. “The longer we wait, the worse it’s going to be for Yang,” Jake explains to Mika, in a hurry to get her to school and Yang serviced. “What do you mean?” Her voice is plaintive. “He’ll start decomposing,” Jake responds. The perfunctory exchange is made strange by the idea that Yang, a techno, can decompose. Is he human, or isn’t he? Is there a third option? Wearing a simple pair of eyeglasses that allow him to review Yang’s memories, Jake enters the planetarium of Yang’s mind. He looks out into an immense constellation of yellow lights, each one a brief vignette: a girl singing at a concert, a younger Mika playing in the woods. The commands are exceptionally simple — “play,” “pause” — and Jake sifts through the fragments. In effect, Yang’s memory bank offers Jake a look at his own life, and more broadly, gives viewers a glimpse of their own minds.
The intimacy of Yang’s memories shifts something in Jake. He notices a girl recur in Yang’s memories and tracks her down: Ada (Haley Lu Richardson) works at a coffee shop, and she’s a clone of her great aunt — Yang’s former owner. Jake seems wary of clones, avoiding his neighbor because of his clone daughters. But Ada tags along with Jake, who asks her about Yang. “Did he ever want to be human?” Ada laughs at this. “That’s such a human thing to ask, isn’t it? We always assume that other beings would want to be human. What’s so great about being human?”
After Yangis focused on asking these questions, not answering them, but it suggests Yang is human in the ways that matter. Through his memories, we know he is Ada’s friend and Mika’s brother. Ada is a clone and Yang is a techno, but those distinctions don’t mean anything in practice. Though Mika is definitively human and Yang is not quite, both have been adopted by Jake and Kyra, integrated into one family. Jake watches one of Yang’s memories: Mika complains that other kids are bullying her at school, telling her that her parents aren’t her real ones. Yang takes Mika on a walk through a grove of trees, pointing out new branches grafted onto existing trunks. “See this branch?” Yang gestures toward one. “This branch is also from another tree. But look, you’re connected to Mom and Dad, just like this branch. You’re part of a family tree. For real.” “Then so are you,” Mika responds.
The symbolism is potent: human connections run many ways, winding and bifurcating, growing. Both Mika and Yang have been grafted into their current nuclear family, but this doesn’t make them less than — it’s simply an observation of what is. Jake and Lyra have chosen each other — and Mika, and Yang. The film’s logic is resolutely inclusive, its nonhuman characters as real as the rest. Jake, for his part, seems to come to this realization. In unspooling Yang’s memories, Jake reconnects with his own family: he’s able to share tender moments with Kyra and Mika through the proxy of Yang’s memories. He begins to comprehend the scope of his estrangement from them, and to return to them. “I don’t want to say bye to gege," Mika says at the end of the film, using her Chinese pet name for Yang, which means “older brother.” “Me neither,” Jake agrees. The implication here is that artificial intelligence might enhance humanity, not destroy it.
