"You shouldn't trust anything he says".

Rating: 8/10 (3 April 2016)

During Ava's (Alicia Vikander) session number two with Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) she utters the words in my summary line above during the first power failure. It was at this point that I understood the film was being far too clever with the viewer in a way that made me apprehensive about everything going on in the story. I'm still trying to figure out if that was a good thing or not. The way I see it, if you've watched enough films across a variety of genres, you're always on the lookout for the tip off that gives you insight into what twists might occur and how the picture might end.
Almost immediately I knew that Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) was a robot, and I wasn't convinced that the power outages weren't being manipulated by Nathan (Oscar Isaac) himself. When it dawns on Caleb that he must question everything about the Turing test, he even begins to suspect that he might be a robot himself. How all this affected me as the viewer was to put me on guard against being manipulated by the outcome. So for me, even Nathan was a suspect in his own game - he could have been the AI in the challenge and that might have worked if the film makers went in that direction.
Almost all the rest then was a distraction. With all possible outcomes suspect, any suspense that might have arisen waiting for the 'big reveal' suddenly evaporated, and because anything was possible the element of surprise was undermined. The exploration of 'feelings' between Ava and Caleb was a tease, and Nathan's admission of providing his AI with sensory devices to experience sexual pleasure was another one of those hooks to condition the viewer to expect some human/robot experimentation. To it's credit, the film didn't resort to some mechanical perversion to make it's statement.
Probably the most intriguing aspect of the film for me was the way Ava was built. I don't pretend to know how the film makers created the special effects to make the character but it was quite incredible. The first time Ava spoke I thought she might have been mapping from internal semantic form to syntactic tree-structure and then getting linearized words. But then I realized, she was only a robot.