Ambitious But Underwhelming, it Often Lacks Subtlety

Rating: 7/10 (1 June 2015)

Small cast, big ideas: that's usually a winning formula for me. And at its core, Ex Machina stretches to reach a very challenging subject: where we draw the line between smart programming and true cognizance. The very idea of artificial intelligence opens up all manner of intriguing moral disputes on its own, particularly when a mammoth global corporation is responsible, and many of those are touched, or maybe clubbed, as the plot slowly unfolds. It has a habit of oversimplifying at points, though, and frequently relaxes into a simple good vs. evil framework that I thought was too easy for the theme's inherent complexities. Intense and thought-provoking at its best, but it has a bad habit of hammering points that would be best treated with a little subtlety. I wanted to like it a lot more than I did.