Review of Ex Machina (2015) by Gamelore — 26 Apr 2015

Actually quite a bad piece of sci-fi. A good example of an awesome subject-matter rendered completely boring. Reminiscent of the target audience for The Internship. To make an entire movie about containing AI, and to have such such obvious security flaws made any AI escape feel intentional.

It's kind of like making Jurrassic Park and the main characters simply sympathetically open the door for the dinosaurs. It insulted the audience by making the protagonist out to be an unbelievably dumb character who you don't want to follow.

Moreover, the pacing was pure **** Tons could have been cut better. Absolutely awesome photography, though (see: Under the Skin for pacing of this style done right). The android was well acted and there were a number of applause-worthy acting scenes scattered throughout a series of increasingly stupid paths that the main character took the audience down.

By about halfway through the movie, after the main character was clearly compromised, the movie had a hard time evoking that earlier emotion from me, however. Ultimately, even the secondary character (the boss) became unbelievably stupid to me by not having a means of healing or defending himself or building in a way to summon help.

Perhaps another way to interpret the movie is that the boss intended for a natural bar for his creation set both at the level of manipulation using another human to escape AND at the "sufficient" sophistitcation necessary for launch, and that his seed was sewn inherently upon death by this creation.

But the movie poster ("what will happen if I fail your test?", indicating sympathy toward the robot) and choice of perspective in the movie (the stupid cog in the wheel) indicates that this isn't the intended point of view.

And even if the latter interpretation were intended, it's still only a slight revelation to imagine that the event was precisely calculated -- but again, I feel like the chosen perspective, and reaction by the "boss" precludes this interpretation.

One good thing: At least it didn't sully any *actual* grand ideas for sci-fi or storytelling and the movie built a lot of hype for good sci-fi (for some reason).