Ex Machina - Nathan the Anti-Hero

In a few moments I am going to tell you how a movie about a naked robot drove me to my knees in repentance.  To be precise, it was Nathan's character that did it.  Our idols can captivate us and enslave us even in the very moment we profess to have mastered that which has mastered us.

It's not my goal in this post to go into depth about the film.  I do recommend it with caution for adults: be prepared for a few scenes of frontal (robot) nudity.  However, it's quite clear the director was attempting to misdirect the viewer to augment the potency of the film's very dark finish (and I hold to be a very important reminder of the total depravity of man).  It's easy to slam Nathan's character as evil and wicked and perhaps he should have been wearing a pair of horns and holding a pitchfork.  There's just one inconvenient fact to point out here, Nathan's character didn't do any of the killing in this story.

God never intended for man to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Some would argue that He did intend that for us, just not now.  Well let's consider that a moment to God is as a million years to man.  As such, I think it's worth forgetting about.  Some things are off limits, and when God says no then no means no.  Yet as humans, God has hard-wired something into our spirits that drive us to "go ahead and do it anyway" despite the consequences.  This is an integral part of our free will and the cornerstone of God's master plan to restore human kind back to Himself.  We go ahead and break the rules and challenge what we think we have to do or what we must do.  I believe whole-heartedly that some part of that God wove into our souls from the dawn of time but perhaps for a very different purpose.

The tragic and ironic nature of an idol, is that it draws us in with promises of freedom, independence, power, and mastery, and then in its latest stages convinces us that we must concede to it effectively robbing us of all those things.  The idol takes on a shape of its own, much like a person, and some will go so far as to call it demonic oppression.  What I believe is indisputable, however, is that it seeks to fool us into believing that we must serve the idol and that there is no way around that.  Thank God that God hard-wired us to rebel against things that try to force our will.

I grew-up around a lot of alcoholism.  I know, intimately, the breadth and depth of the phrase "beer, the cause of, and answer to, all of life's problems!" and what I have learned is that alcoholics are alcoholics because something is eating at their souls and they are seeking refuge from it in a bottle.  Being a depressant, it feeds an endless cycle that becomes harder and harder to escape from.

I believe Nathan felt that he was an agent of evolution in his invention of thinking machines.  And because Nathan (again, my opinion) was a determinist, he felt that it was inevitable, beyond his control, and was hence trapped by his own genius.  He felt it was his burden to create those machines, that it was his role and destiny to create those machines, and wanting to rebel against all that he would drink himself into a stupor and suppress exercising his God-given free-will to escape it.  Nathan's idol was two-fold: determinism and alcoholism.  Like everything in the cosmos, all things go through cycles and oscillation, and I believe the same is true of idols.  We tend to flip-flop back and forth between two or more different idols.  In my case, code and coffee, hands down.

God calls us to set aside our idols and give Him our first-fruits.  He doesn't call us to fight our idols, or to work with our idols, or to outsource the fight to a third party, He calls us to abandon them outright, turn 180 degrees and walk the other direction (Ez 14:6).  Ex Machina struck a huge chord with me.  A brilliant man's idolatry of artificial intelligence and its connection to determinism eventually consumed him and claimed his very life.  If we personify an idol momentarily for the sake of argument, the idol's imperative is to fool you into thinking you will achieve life and fulfilment through it, while secretly intending to rob it from you and drive a dagger into your heart.  This was pontificated by the bone-chilling and cold calculating robot that killed her creator, killed her accomplice, but most importantly of all, the one individual who showed nothing but kindness and compassion to her, the one individual who sought to cultivate a human sense of free will in her, she locked-away left for dead.  For me the metaphor was thick with irony and Ava became for me the personification of idolatry and its consequences.

God calls us to cast down our idols for He knows the plans He has for us, and those plans are not to harm us but to give us a hope and a future.  We tell ourselves (and Him) that our idols are good and make us happy.  And the personification of that idol smiles with a cold and calculating satisfaction, for it has successfully played us for fools.  I found myself identifying with both Nathan and Caleb.  I have been burnt by reaching out to people who have stabbed me in the back and I have put my own programming inventions before God and His kingdom.  If we find ourselves saying that our idols really aren't a problem and some of them are even good to have, my question for you is this: is that you or the idol talking? 

Be a rebel, drop out of light speed behind the shields, set some charges, and raise a little heaven.