Film Review - Ex Machina (2015)

Ex Machina is written and directed by Alex Garland and stars Dominic Gleeson as Caleb, a young computer coder working for a company headed by the reclusive Nathan (Oscar Isaac) and Nathan invites him to his mountain hideaway to show him something that could change the world.

Hmmmm the more I begin to think about this movie I really start to feel mixed by it and this feeling I just cannot escape but before I delve into what misfired for me I want to talk about what I did like and that is the look and feel Garland creates for this film, it has that very old fashioned Sci-Fi feel to it where the ideas were the strongest and not everyone going BANG! CRASH! BOOM! every 5 seconds and the performance by Alicia Vikander as Ava the creation at the heart of this film is really very good, hopefully she isn't wasted in the upcoming Man from UNCLE film later this year.

But outside of that again I just didn't find myself all that engaged with it emotionally and I can't help but feel that it's because both Nathan and Caleb aren't that interesting as characters, they sit around, drink booze, talk about computer stuff but they also feel like very straight laced white bread caricatures who could probably have done with some intimacy with the opposite sex as the way they talk about the women of this film is kinda problematic for me.

And the reason I feel this is so is because to them women can easily be dismissed as some sort of rogue computer program that if it goes wrong then they can use their intelligence to create one that obeys their commands which is probably why I found the climax pretty interesting and to cast Gleeson and Isaac in these roles made me feel somewhat that they were pretty much wasted in this film and when it comes to Isaac that feels disappointing to say.

And so that was Ex Machina, Garland's look and feel is great but his male characters really sunk it for me, 2 and a half out of 5.