Good not Great, Highly Overrated

Rating: 4/10 (19 May 2015)

Ex Machina was an enjoyable movie, but if anyone were to honestly compare it to similar sci-fi movies, they would quickly see that it is far inferior to these. Here is why:
Visuals: There were none. There was a setting, the actors/actresses and the robots. There were no slow motion scenes, no zooming slowly, no intense imagery, just very vanilla director work.
Writing: The writing revealed every "surprise" moment, moments before the surprise moment removing any feeling of suspense. Most of the scenes felt isolated, mainly because it felt as though the writer was more interested in letting you see how smart he was rather than telling a story. Too many times there were philosophical disconnections (explaining how the robots brain functioned) from the actual story, and although they tied into the story (in a very clumsy way), they didn't make the story any better and in some cases, worse. The disconnection was that these bits of story were under-utilized throughout the rest of the story.
In general the movie felt flat/vanilla and I could almost get the feeling that more time was spent making the robots look like robots than the story and visuals of the movie look/feel special. As a HUGE Sci-Fi fan (especially of this specific sub- genre) I was pretty disappointed with the movie. I've seen too many really good ones, to think this should be mentioned in the same breath.