Beautiful, but fell short

Rating: 6/10 (27 April 2015)

I was so excited to see this film, but it really fell short for me, mainly in that the characters were poorly-developed. With 1 hr and 50 minutes, and only 3 or 4 characters in the entire story, there must be some serious script problems if a film fails to develop any of those parts into complex, sympathetic characters the audience can really connect with. In the end, I connected with none of them, and hungered for the film to to engage the deeper character issues that felt ripe for the taking, but were only touched-on at the surface. Visually, Ex Machina was a beautiful, well-made and well-acted piece of film, but the dialogue seemed to fail to develop interesting, complex, human characters we could really care about and empathize with. I easily get sucked-into characters and stories. Its my favorite part of the film-watching experience, but this film failed to make me feel that I deeply understood (or cared about) even one of the characters.