Too weighed down in scientific exposition, without providing a truly thrilling story

Rating: 4/10 (19 September 2015)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a young professor, who's been called out at the behest of the eccentric, reclusive Nathan (Oscar Isaac.) Nathan wants Caleb to perform the Turing Test on Ava (Alicia Vikander) to determine whether she has advanced AI. But Ava is not your average person- she's a synthetic cyborg, with human features, and before long, she's engaging in a determined battle of wits with the two men she's holed up in her secluded sanctuary with, the conscientious Caleb desperate to understand her, and the slightly warped Nathan with plans of his own.
In recent years, the world has been swept with a new found appreciation for all things scientific, with high tech gadgets becoming must have accessories and the science fiction genre enjoying a popular, more mainstream following among cinema goers in a way you wouldn't have dreamed a few years ago. It's in this new found science fiction realm that Ex Machina, the directorial debut of acclaimed writer Alex Garland, has emerged. A film with a subtle nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey, in it's themes of machines taking over and controlling humans, and with flourishes of that film's style and tone, it's sadly all lost in translation, and bogged down in too much scientific exposition and psychobabble to really engage.
There's enormous potential in the film's isolated setting, with only a few central characters to keep our eye on as events progress, and the dynamics between these characters as they reveal their motivations behind what each of them are doing, could have been sparkling, but the film is really just aggressively cerebral, wriggling for the most part in a pretty humourless script, that gets pleasantly broken during an impromptou, incomprehensible disco dancing sequence, where Oliver Cheatham's Get Down Saturday Night suddenly comes blaring out and surprises everyone.
Science Fiction is getting readily accepted by a far larger portion of the population these days, no longer just the sole preserve of what people might call 'geeks', but it still has to be presented in a digestible format that those without a PhD might get, and Ex Machina, despite it's few neat touches, just isn't like this. **