Stunning debut from novelist-screenwriter Alex Garland

Rating: 8/10 (17 May 2015)

EX MACHINA auspiciously marks the directorial debut from British screenwriter Alex Garland, who is also a novelist, he is the author of THE BEACH, later would become a misfire for Danny Boyle and its star Leonardo DiCaprio in 2000, and after having soaked himself as a screenwriter in Sci-Fi genre pieces like Boyle's SUNSHINE (2007) and Mark Romanek's NEVER LET ME GO (2010), his latest offering is a tantalising cautionary tale about artificial intelligence.
Compacting the kernel among three main characters, Nathan (Isaac) is the CEO of world's largest search engine company Bluebook, he invents a humanoid robot named Ava (Vikander), and Caleb (Gleeson) is one of his lucky code programmer, who has been chosen to be give Ava the classic Turing test, to determine whether or not she has "intelligence". There are seven sessions altogether carried out in Nathan's reclusive scientific research centre they are accompanied only by Nathan's Japanese assistant Kyoto (Mizuno), who apparently cannot understand and speak any English.
Caleb is an ordinary young man with a tragic back-story, wide-eyed and thrilled to be involved in this evolutionary achievement of humankind, as he tells Nathan, it is not just a change of the human history, but in fact if Ava passes the test, it will change the history of Gods, because only God can create intelligence! As the centre encounters constant unknown power-cuts, during which Caleb and Ava are sequestered from being monitored by Nathan, Ava warns Caleb that Nathan is not what he seems to be, and they gradually share a mutual affection to each other. Swayed by Ava's warning, Caleb begins to secretively dig into Nathan's works, and a discovery drives him to become paranoid to an extreme extent that he even questions his own identity, is himself a robot too?
Under the influence of Ava's commitment, a gullible Caleb schemes an audacious plan to elope with her, in the other hand, Nathan is the opposite of gullibility, who is friend and who is foe, Caleb will have to learn the lesson in the hardest way he can ever imagine.
A great viewing experience with suspense and concentration can be crystallised through the film's integral accomplishments of the central trio's dynamic acting, awesome shots of nature's luxuriant palette to expel the default claustrophobic atmosphere, a thoroughly engaging and sometimes eerie soundtrack adheres flawlessly to the structure of the narrative, all is done with the sleek competence which indicates Mr. Garland is going to have a bright future in the director's chair. Maybe one can say the A.I. created in the film is really ahead of our time, but one relevant thing concerns everyone is his sharp perception of mobile phone companies' tacit permission of amassing private data from billions of their users, this is an alarm bell to urge our society and government to investigate the current situation and prevent such privacy-violation with uncompromising legal means.
Performances are top-form, Domhnall Gleeson is profoundly utilised to elicit compassion and support as audience's surrogate to adventure in a tempting chess game, and his ANNA KARENINA (2012) co-star Vikander is stunning in passing off as an android with inscrutable depth of wisdom can outsmart most human beings, blur the definitive line between man and machine and potentially supplant them, this is man's deepest fear in the booming genre concerning A.I. technology, plus a precisely rendered CGI does help tremendously for the film's surreal tonality. Oscar Isaac, is charismatic and enigmatic simultaneously, as the most unstable variant of the trio, the key driving force with an ulterior motivation, his can alternate from chummy geniality to threatening menace in one second, moreover, a surprising vignette of his dance routine with Kyoto is plain stroke of genius under its context. To say the very least EX-MACHINA is an earnest and compelling piece of hard Sci- Fi thriller who challenges to tackle the subject matter into a more pertinent situation and establishes itself as a sounding warning against the possible negative reverberations of today's fairly impressive progress in the cutting-edge field.