Ummm... it's good... but more of an "intellectual film" for teenage boys

Rating: 7/10 (26 October 2018)

I usually don't like to dive too much into social politics, but it can't really be avoided in this particular case.
Let's cut to the chase: This is one of those movies where it sort of tries to empower women by also objectifying them, which in the end just makes them objectified. This kind of portrayal usually comes from people who are trying to be hip with social justice but don't know how to quite pull it off, sort of like a man who says, "Oh, we need to go out and help women with social issues because they are so delicate, fragile, and beautiful creatures!". Basically, in trying to help stop a problem you are also perpetuating it.
There are just so many shots and moments where we just focus on Ava either being nude, walking around "delicately", or in a "innocent quirky fashion" where (I absolutely hate to use this term, but...) everything is set-up like a "male-gaze" shot. Granted, that partially plays into the theme of the movie that Ava is intentionally manipulating people with her sexuality, but that doesn't really stop her from being objectified. It's just kind of a muddled mess where one moment you are supposed to feel terrible that a potential creep is basically designing sex dolls for himself and might be raping them, but then in the next scene the camera is doing the male-gaze cinematography and overemphasizing how "pure" she is. Again, that is why this film feels more like an intellectual film for teenage boys.
The romance between our protag and Ava felt a bit forced. I do not think that any normal human male would fall in love with a robot that is clearly a robot in only a matter of two days or so. The protagonist in general was a bit frustrating, because he took everything so serious even when nothing serious was going. One scene, which was disturbing, is of him finding old video files of the previous robot experiments and he starts freaking out about how cruel this is... but... what did he expect? Wasn't that already a given? He knew that this Inventor was making AI robots and when he finds footage of the failed experiments he suddenly freaks out... why? He should've already known all of this was going on because he knew there were prototypes before Ava already. Overall, the protagonist is interesting at times, but at other times he is a bit obnoxious and overreacts... such as falling in love with a robot in two days.
There was one other element that disappointed me which was the fact that the Asian woman was a robot. I felt like this kind of destroyed some of the symbolism of how a human could enslave another and treat them like a robot, but then fall in love with their own creation. This would've been a bit more profound, but it just turns out that she is a machine. Oh well.

Moving onto the good: This film is not a bad film, and it is great at building a mystery. I kind of figured Ava would be bad in some manner, but I didn't expect her to completely betray our protagonist (which, again, feels a bit odd when there is kind of a message going on about objectifying women but then it turns out if you trust her she backstabs you and leaves you to die while enjoying life out in the sun regardless if you were nice to her or not? I'm probably reading too deeply into this) so I thought that was a nice little twist. Also, our protagonist being a human was another twist, as the film was sort of building him up to be another robot I was pleasantly surprised that the filmmakers didn't go down that route.
All in all, Ex Machina is not a bad film and it is well shot and engaging for most of the film; however, the final act is a bit of a mess with some pacing issues and some theming problems as well.