The sci-fi flop Ron Howard adores: “Not an easy movie to market”
Of all the genres, science fiction is perhaps the most frequently misjudged by contemporary audiences. On one hand, this is understandable—sci-fi is inherently experimental, built on wild extrapolation and invention, so it’s not surprising that viewers might need time to fully process and appreciate its ideas. On the other hand, it’s also the genre most prone to ageing poorly. We’ve known for more than two decades that 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t accurately predict the year 2001, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief that Blade Runner’s dystopian vision of 2019 never came to pass.
There is an argument to be made that the best science fiction movies should not be blockbuster successes. Movies like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men fared poorly at the box office, but have gone on to heavily influence later filmmakers.
It’s also fairly reasonable to assume that movies like Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 and Alex Garland’s Annihilation will someday be equally important to filmmakers. It seems as if the best science fiction is the kind that is so dense and original that it takes years to fully unpack.
According to director Ron Howard, there is another recent science fiction flop that didn’t get its due. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything thread around the time his 2015 film Heart of the Sea was released, the director was asked whether there were any recent films he’d recommend that people might not have heard of. “Well, I hope people have heard of Ex Machina and have seen that movie,” he responded. “I loved it. It didn’t do all that well on [its] theatrical run–you know, one of those things. Not an easy movie to market. But it’s getting some attention in the awards race, and it really deserves it.”
Ex Machina was Alex Garland’s directorial debut after spending the first decades of his career writing novels (includingThe Beach, which was adapted into an unsettling Danny Boyle film), and screenplays (including the one for 28 Days Later). Released in 2014, it stars Domhnall Gleeson as a young programmer who is invited to the palatial estate of a mysterious tech billionaire (Oscar Isaac) to test his latest invention, a humanoid robot played by Alicia Vikander.
It received excellent reviews when it was released, with critics praising the depth and seriousness with which it explores the ideas of sentience, artificial intelligence, and scientific ethics. However, it struggled at the box office, possibly due to its slow pace and dense, cerebral plot. Early trailers of the film depicted it as a stylish, pulse-pounding, horror-inflected thriller, and while it certainly has those elements, it is, like Garland’s next film, Annihilation, extremely cryptic and refuses to offer easy answers.
As Howard hoped, Ex Machina did pick up awards momentum, earning two Oscar nominations and winning the award for ‘Best Visual Effects’. It continues to be the only film for which Garland has been nominated for an Academy Award, though he lost the ‘Best Original Screenplay’ statuette to Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy for Spotlight.
