A real girl

Rating: 8/10 (23 May 2020)

It just goes to show. A guy's head can be turned by a pretty face even if the body is a see-through electronic framework combined with a dressmaker's dummy.
Caleb Smith, a smart computer programmer working for tech billionaire Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), is invited to his isolated home. Nathan has developed a humanoid robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander) and he is very keen to see how Caleb reacts with her on a number of levels, especially an intimate one.
However those of us trained on three seasons of "Westworld" know that A.I. experiments that blur the lines between human consciousness and clever electronics usually end badly.
The film shows what an innovative filmmaker can do with a couple of actors and an isolated location. I love the feeling of solitude in this movie with that underlying edginess driving the whole thing. Nathan's remote dwelling is almost like being on a space station with the normal world far away.
Of course, the concept for this film isn't one that was just born in the digital age. Didn't Mary Shelley start this sort of thing with "Frankenstein"? Maybe it's even down to "Pinocchio", with Ava the robot just wanting to be a real girl.
The special effects are brilliant. We totally accept Ava. She is sexy in the same odd way as was Maria, the robot woman in Fritz Lang's silent film "Metropolis". The weird thing is that Ava isn't really that much sexier when she puts on the top-to-toe, human nude-suit at the end.
"Ex Machina" plays with the idea that as our technology develops, we may have to re-think our interactions with artificial intelligence and also what we normally think of as attractive.