Fascinating, but not nearly as smart as it thinks it is

Rating: 8/10 (5 July 2015)

Some kid who looks like an extra from The Imitation Game wins a contest. Turns out he's a programmer named Caleb (where do they find these ridiculous names?). He's flown for hours by chopper past glaciers. He ends up in a high tech house where he finally meets the guy in charge--some alcoholic arrogant manipulative jerk who is also his boss. This guy, Nathan, developed some AI and wants Caleb to tale part in a Turing test. As done here, the test consists of Caleb interacting with the machine and judging the quality of the AI.
The machine is called Ava (wow, they didn't go straight with Eve!) and is lovely. Only her face, hands, and feet are covered in what looks like skin. Her chest and pelvis are made of some grey honeycomb fiber. Her abdomen and extremities are transparent and you can see some fibers/wires/LED lights. She has encyclopedic knowledge of everything but no real-life experience of the world as she lives confined in a room. She becomes interested in Caleb as she's never interacted with another human aside from Nathan. Quickly, her femininity comes to the fore as she becomes particularly interested in Caleb's feelings. She's innocent and slightly seductive. In her spare time she likes to draw.
Nathan, too, doesn't want to hear Caleb's intellectual analyses of Ava, he wants to know about his feelings for some reason. We also learn a bit about Nathan. He runs the world's biggest search engine. Ava's brain is a result of all these searches by humanity plus all their cell phone activity which he has been spying on and recording.
Caleb becomes obsessed with Ava watching her on a monitor while they are apart. There's not much else to do at the house/research facility. Nathan drinks a lot and works out the next day. He has a Japanese assistant that cooks for him but doesn't speak any English. She too occasionally monitors the interaction between Ava and Caleb.
One odd things is that there are regular power outages in the house, which Nathan can't figure out. Ava confesses that's she responsible for them so that she and Caleb can have moments of privacy without being seen and recorded by Nathan. She comes clean. She wants to be with Caleb so she wants his help to escape. Caleb agrees since he knows that Natahn will destroy her, once the next AI version is developed. They develop a plan.
The day of the escape, which is also the final day of the test, Nathan decides he doesn't want to get drunk, which was part of the plan. Now he comes clean. He installed a battery powered camera so he overheard their plan. And the actual test was to see if Ava would use all her resources to manipulate Caleb to obtain her freedom. But Caleb, too, has a surprise up his sleeve. The preparation for the escape are already in place. Ava is free to leave her room and to have a moment with her maker. We learn that Ava wasn't the first AI, but there are some more. But Ava also shows some initiative as she goes beyond the plan in so far as Caleb is concerned.
Ex Machina is an engaging movie. Gleeson can't hide his Britishness but does an OK job playing an American nerd. Still, his character is missing something. Ava is fascinating--adorable in her human features, strange in her mechanical ones. I'll give the director credit for resisting the urge of showing the guts of the machine in close-up detail. Such explicitness would have ruined things. Also refreshing is the directors reluctance to use hyper closeups as the actors are talking. I sure hope those days are coming to an end. Hernandez, who looks like he got lost on his way to The Hangover 5 soundstage is awful but so is his character. Why a super rich and super smart executive would be such a mess makes no sense. The interactions between Nathan and Caleb are obnoxious and...too artificial...given the revolutionary event they are part of while the interaction between Ava and Caleb while more human, have an unnecessary sinister atmosphere about them as if Ava at any moment could blow up the planet. That said, the movie captures well the strangeness of it all and it does so in a very subtle way. The settings in Norway are gorgeous.
The movie thinks it's particularly smart. It throws around references to Wittgenstein, some painter who throws paint on a canvas, Nietzsche isn't mentioned by name but the idea of the superman is on Nathan's mind as he envisions a future of AI who will look upon humans as apes; I guess there's some reference to Plato, too. However, all this is entirely superficial. Far more interesting are the implications of this bizarre urge to create AI by giant corporations who these days have all of humanity's private info at their disposal. But these ideas are also just mentioned and not fully developed.
As the movie builds up a lot of tension toward the final resolution it is no surprise then that it is rather disappointing. You could argue that freedom would indeed be a definite mark of successful (American) AI, but why then the final display of evil by Ava? Or is she and AI beyond good and evil? I think it's a mistake ultimately. If Ava's brain is an aggregate of humanity's internet and cell phone activity then Ava's personal goal aside from freedom shouldn't be independence but community. At least the end was thought-provoking.