A gem of a Sci-Fi-movie: flawless and intellectually challenging

Rating: 10/10 (1 March 2017)

I will attempt a somewhat deeper interpretation of this great Sci- Fi-movie and thus there are major spoilers ahead! 26-year-old programmer Caleb (D. Gleeson), who works for a big internet company wins an internal competition: he gets the privilege of visiting the company boss and ingenious software developer Nathan (O. Isaac) in his remote estate for a week. There, Nathan encourages Caleb to take part in an epoch-making experiment: the young employee meets Nathan's latest creation, the marvelously beautiful robot lady Ava (A. Vikander) and he is supposed to find out how human she really is.
"Ex Machina" is a gem of a movie: director Alex Garland did radically away with all antics and appendixes, focusing on an exceptionally well-crafted screenplay that contents itself with no more than 4 characters and the basic setting: Nathan's hypermodern claustrophobic "research facility". The result is a film without any flaws, a theater-like play that almost entirely feeds on the fascinating interactions between Caleb and Nathan and between Caleb and Ava. As the viewers will only gradually come to understand, the innocence of winning a company competition and taking part in a revolutionary experiment transforms into a dark manipulative game that challenges the ethics of scientific research.
Oscar Isaac's performance is stunning as he plays what I consider a uniquely multi-facetted villain: in the beginning, Nathan comes off as a surprisingly casual and relaxed pal. Caleb is understandably in awe when he first meets his boss, the owner of a multi-billion tech- company and one of the foremost innovators of his time. But soon clouds appear on the horizon: Nathan has an arrogant streak and his casual we-are-on-the-same-level treatment of Caleb is contrasted with the feeling of superiority that he undoubtedly has for his employee. Mid-way into the movie, Caleb sees through some of Nathan's lies and learns that he was chosen to be the proband because of his above- average intelligence and his coding skills. However, the scope of manipulation and deceit goes even further and in the bitter end, Caleb finds out that he has been the bait for Ava. He was played by Nathan, who wanted to know if a human could fall in love with a robot, thereby getting a valid response to whether the Turing Test has been passed. And the hapless employee was also played by Ava, who uses his feelings to get out of her prison. Ultimately, Nathan appears as an unscrupulous and ruthless scientist villain who subordinates human feelings to his research interests. It is one of the most frightening depictions of where superior intelligence in a human being can lead when it is not grounded by any moral standards and this is a very current issue. To create his A.I.-robot in the first place, Nathan drew on the massive amount of data provided by the billions of cellphone/notebook-users. Unknowing to them, he tapped into this infinite data stream to construct a machine that is bound to be smarter than any human and also more beautiful than any human because its beauty is permanent, unfading and immaculate. Ava, the robot counterpart of Eve, seduces – just like her biblical precursor – Caleb to respond to her urge to be free and thus uncontrolled by her human Frankenstein, Nathan. Like in the Frankenstein-story, the creature eventually turns against its creator. The stunning and disturbing ending transforms the innocence of the beginning: courtesy of its superior intelligence and limitless knowledge, Ava has outplayed Caleb and Nathan. She steps into nature and into the populated world of cities and the viewers are left to wonder what she is planning to do next..