Film Review - Ex Machina

Spoiler alert! And a fairly big one this time because I am pretty much going to tell the whole story.

This has the potential to be a decent film.

Oscar Isaac has a dodgy beard and a shaved head, and that distracts from the storyline a bit. Actually that comes back a few times, as he always looks slightly out of place. A basic explanation that Gleeson is here to test if a robot is sentient and then the robot is introduced almost immediately and the special effects are very good. 

So we wait for the twist.

Some highly technical discussion of the what makes an AI sentient, but filled with primary school inaccuracies about the Turing test. Some scars on his back, is he a robot? Is Oscar Isaac a robot? Another random woman appears and obviously the is a robot? So maybe the vagaries of the test rules mean something clever about which robot is being tested?

And so we wait for the twist.

Some random female nudity and some crude discussion of her physical abilities to try and distract half the viewers from the fact that really nothing is actually happening. Gleeson cutting himself to check that he isn't a robot. Letting out the secret that the robot has more control than expected (even though that was obvious half an hour ago). 

And we are still waiting for the twist.

Here comes the twist. Wait is that it? None of the expected twists, a half baked, plot-hole filled twist instead. And suddenly we are done.

Really disappointing.


Rating 6 or 7 / 10. Probably only deserves a 6 for not quite delivering on the promise.