Review 714: Ex Machina

                                                                             Ex Machina is fascinating, intriguing and  An impressive debut for Alex Garland.

After winning a competition to spend a week at the mountain estate of his company's brilliant CEO Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), programmer Caleb Smith (Domhall Gleeson) arrives to discover he has been chosen to take part in a study of artificial intelligence. Sworn to secrecy and cut from the outside world, Caleb meets his subject, a beguiling and seductive android named Ava (Alicia Vikander) - and is plunged into an A.I. experiment beyond his wildest dreams.

The future presented in Ex Machina is 10 minutes from now. If a big company like Apple of Google invented Ava, we would all be surprised but we wouldn't be that surprised. Alex Garland smartly and wisely breaks up the movie into little vignettes. 

Not unlike Spike Jonze's Her from a couple of years ago, Ex Machina revolves around a relationship between a man and an A.I. Her works as a lighthearted rom com whereas Ex Machina is more of a tense thriller. The core of Ex Machina is how these four people interect with each other and challenge each other and what the answers to Celeb's tests with Ava are. Garland smartly uses these three characters to explore very contemporary fundemental human and psychological issues like techology.

If a machine has all the qualities that we as human beings have and value most highly in terms of self awareness and emotion but can't get ill and is not really mortal, it can live as long as it's maintained which is what Ava represents.

Alex Garland's makes an impressive debut  the cinematography is  the score by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow

Domhnall Gleeson has a very aimiable screen presence which comes very handy when playing Caleb Smith.  Caleb is just an unasuming programmer who's been selected to  He assumes that he's there to spend the week hanging out and bonding with Nathan

Oscar Isaac  playing Nathan Bateman. Nathan  But underneath his muscular build, causal speech patterns, he’s actually a world class genius  Him buddying up to Caleb mask a deeply unpleasant persona 

Alicia Vikander is mesmirising playing Ava. Having spent her whole existence in one room, she longs to escape Nathan and explore the world

Sonoya Mizuno  Kyoko doesn't know  a masterful bodylanguage driven performance that conveys a lot without saying a single line of dialogue.