Arguably the best sci-fi movie of 2015, intelligent and smart and trying to impress you not with great picture but with a great content

Rating: 10/10 (6 July 2015)

Artificial Intelligence is one of the main topics in sci-fi for a past 50 years, but the farther we go in the future the scarier becomes a perspective of finding yourselves surrounding by self-learning robots, toasters with self-awareness and cell-phones which you can talk with when there is no one to talk (the last one is probably very close). And problems about AI is the same in every book - can people give feelings to their washer machines? Will it become a crime to kill your TV? How your cell-phone will feel about it? But every writer use different tools for showing how dangerous it can be to play the God.
Ex Machina is a chamber composition of ex-screenwriter Alex Garland, it is a solo performance theater, a psychological thriller, intelligent sci-fi that was shot in a single room in a Norwegian hotel with a budget comparable with a cost of "Mad Max Fury Road" or "Avengers" costumes. The resemblance with something like Duncan Jones' "Moon" is uncanny. Here we have an overly enthusiastic programmer/millionaire Nathan who has designed a code for the most advanced search engine Blue Book (all characters are fictional, any similarities are purely coincidental) while being a 13 y.o. boy. He believes that evolution is unstoppable and it's better for the world if he becomes God than anyone else. So he creates Ava - the next step in the evolution of his search engine, the robot with human face (needless to say, very pretty face of a delightful Alicia Vikander) and a conscious of a child. Ava locked in her room from the "birth" (or would you rather say "the creation") and did not see a single human except of her creator, therefore she has a very superficial knowledge about how the world works or how humans interact. Nathan invites Caleb, a randomly chosen programmer from his company, in his house in the middle of nowhere for a "field testing" of Ava. Sh*t rapidly hits the fan and everything becomes so twisted you can barely tell who's a friend, who's an enemy, who's a experimental animal and who's a tester. Garland starts with a simple story about two geeks playing with a robot gradually lead us to complicated questions of moral and responsibility in operating mechanical feelings of artificial intelligence.
The whole film passing through dialogs between Caleb and Ava or Caleb and Nathan, and sometimes it seems like a director telling us what to think or feel by monologuing with a mouthsof actors. But the farther film goes the less obvious remains and the more questions appear which the director doesn't want to answer. Slow-paced and viscous narration of the film seems endless, while alternating with placatory sequences of Norwegian nature it makes you fidget on the end of the seat with impatience feeling very uncomfortably. This awkwardness intensifies with a very on spot director's move - he makes Ava a women with seemingly no particular reason (that's one more question which movie rejects to answer straight) and she doesn't hide her feminine immodestly showing her sexually attractive body at regular basis. Her nudity is very specific and it's making you feel weird to be attracted to a partly mechanical partly human robot. A discomfort is very real and movie skilfully puts pressure on the sore spots, making you feel awkward while playing with rhythm and your nerves like the mad millionaire plays with a feelings and life of innocent robot-girl.
Special thanks is needed to be said to the beautiful Alicia Vikander. While there are as many as 3 and a half actors in the film, she as a corner-stone of the whole staging draws all the attention to her, making a movie so believable and terrifyingly authentic. This effect wouldn't be even barely possible if she had not manage the pressure of being the one and only actor in this solo performance theater. And she did amazing job.
The Ridley Scott's "Martian" is coming later in the year and even being based on an awards winning novel supported with a money ten times bigger than Ex Machina's budget, it will be difficult for it to compete with arguably the best sci-fi movie of 2015.