Review of Ex Machina (2015) by Jordan P — 19 Sep 2018

This film was fantastic up until the very end, so spoiler alert. The Ava character acted human up to the point in which she failed to express compassion. This could be brushed off by the Caleb character's explanation of her expressing "autism", but I think compassion is a distinctly human characteristic, and if this was not present in the AI then the model was incomplete.

Sentience does not just mean you can experience a world of color, sentience means that you express free will and have a capacity for understanding and acting on what is right and wrong. Her last act in the movie did not express this, and was almost vindictive towards her benefactor.

No reasoning in sentience would support this, and so I think this was poor script-writing in an attempt to not have a cookie-cutter happy ending. Caleb could have had his brains bashed in by Nathan and it would have been a better ending than that.

I guess you could say that her reasoning was so that no one would know she was artificial, but that is also faulty because at some point, people would find out. She either would last to a point where she never aged or she'd break and they'd figure it out via autopsy.

Every other aspect of this movie was carefully thought out and enacted to show her sentience, and this was just a moron addition that I would probably edit out of the movie if I had access to a personal copy.

For being such a fantastic film, way to ruin it by trying to grab more critics. Besides that, the interchanges between the characters are clever, it extensively goes into what it means to be human and the rights of a being with sentience.

As I've mentioned in a lot of other film reviews, this movie touches on abortion, and selective genetic screening as being heinous, because what right do you have to turn off a human being because the circumstances aren't right, or they aren't the version and operating software that you want? The movie was thrilling and the cinematography really engages your eyes.

I loved how Caleb began to question his own reality and how the movie didn't let that remain too ambiguous. I would recommend this movie, but I'd also gladly say that the ending sucks.