Great acting, smart dialogue, horrendous plot holes

Rating: 5/10 (26 April 2015)

It's unfortunate when a director and writer has a great concept but his conceit is in expecting the audience to suspend their disbelief for items which cannot be dismissed. This includes a genius acting as if his IQ has suddenly plummeted to double digits and asking people to forget what they see every day.
Ex Machina is a smart story about a computer programmer who has suddenly won a trip to spend a week with the founder genius of the world's largest search engine (called "Bluebook" - how is that for laughs?) The mysterious founder is a recluse, and our protagonist is to spend a week with the founder, helping him work on the most advanced device mankind has ever seen. You've all heard about what that is so it's no secret -- it's Ava -- a new form of artificial life that has not been given the famous "Touring Test" by anyone other than the machine's creator. Is this life? Is it a machine? Other questions crop up as our resident genius seems to have a more ominous side, at least on the surface which is all our protagonist gets to see.
So what absolutely obliterates this movie? The director expects the audience to believe two essential aspects of the movie are just present - a "deus ex machina" if you will. They are simply preposterous. They are: 1. Key card security is all that is needed to protect the most advanced research lab every built. No retina or fingerprint scanning. They don't even need passwords to protect anything - just a keycard.
2. Power outages occur for which the generator does not function. Not only does the genius owner not investigate, he doesn't even have the backup power continue to keep his security systems running.
Unfortunately these items obviously play a very central role in this movie. While I really enjoyed the acting and some of the dialog, these flaws were impossible to ignore without reducing the movie to laughable, teen fantasy level. While some may debate the ending, which I thought was fine even though it should have gone in a more sensible direction, it doesn't change the fact that your suspension of disbelief has ended long before this comes into play. While I could even buy into the nonsense about gleaning information from search engine searches, make no mistake -- these issues unfortunately will remove this film from being a classic -- although Isaac and Vikander's performances were truly terrific.