Ex Machina (2014)'s comments - page 2

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Phiphi

It would be cool if anglo-saxon moviemakers stopped disproportionately using asian women in "obedient objects you have easy sex with"-type roles.

1 year 7 months ago

Borvaran

Is all about the questions.

7 years 6 months ago

Very pleasant experience. Even as I was predicting some of the plot development, it still managed to throw plenty of effective curve balls and keep me hooked all the way through. The music was also very engaging. Overall a fantastic film, especially as a directorial debut.

7 years 11 months ago

KJha

Interesting movie with an unexpected end. Liked it.

8 years 7 months ago

pramodc84

Beautiful, one needs to go through analysis videos to understand deep meaning of this movie. That way its not easily accessible

1 year 11 months ago

Lumen

Great movie, but could have been so much better.
-I like the claustrophobic sci-fi combi, it's not about conquering space, unlimited potential... quite the opposite: it's all about limits, physical and spiritual.
-It's well filmed, the sessions are really smart and we experience the manipulation so well. The settings are simple and beautiful.
-The story is very interesting, and very sharp and subtle, especially the first hour.
-I really like the focus on the body and the senses, the creation of AI in our image, or rather in a desired image. AI as erotic dream. But also AI discovering the world they have been given (Ava's exploring fingers, her big observing eyes).
-The idea between our will to create free AI but also to control it is very intriguing. This idea should have been explored more I think.

That brings me to the what could have been better:
-don't you feel that the plot is losing so much realism and depth after about an hour?
-I hear a lot of compliments about the acting, but I think Oscar Isaac is too flat (also related to his character development in the script), this film invited for deeper psychological development.

Looking forward to see more of Garland :)

8 years 7 months ago

rhitwick

9/10

An awesome movie after a long time.

8 years 8 months ago

Melty

One of the best movies I have seen! Nothing original, but the feeling the movie left me with is one that I have never felt before...

8 years 10 months ago

Falkhorn

Nathan is what a 13 year ld would think a company CEO would be. Hated the character.

In the end, this movie fails at the premise it sets out to achieve, which is interesting dialogue. Dialogue with an AI capable of competent speech and thought is something that has tons of potential because you're not dealing with a human being and you can play with that, a lot. Kaleb could have asked much more interesting questions that could result in a better development of the two characters.

He could have asked why she loved him or what she feels. He could have straight up undressed himself and see the reaction of AVA, or he could have literally asked Nathan to get inside AVA's room and have sex with her.

The movie, for some odd reason, goes on an existential tangent for 10 minutes where Caleb thinks he might be a robot himself. This comes out of the blue, there's not a good justification for it and it comes off as bad filler.

The escape sequence doesn't make much sense either. Seems like the writer got stuck in a roadblock and used Kioko as a deus ex machina (pun not intended). Kioko doesn't understand english and yet she understands AVA and helps her kill Nathan. It's also weird how Nathan, being th genius that he is, doesn't have a panic button or just a back door access to his robots to shut them off with a command word or button, more so when he's had experiences with rebellios AI's before.

TL DR: It's a decent movie with annoying characters and missed opportunity with the character's dialogue.

6 years 1 month ago

sneha

It just didn't blow my mind like I was expecting it to be. I didn't expect a cozy drama. I was expecting an I, Robot may be..

6 years 12 months ago

Earring72

Interesting Sci Fi drama has a nice set up but has too many plotholes to hit the bulls eye. Well acted and great production design but movie felt cold.

Worth viewing though

8 years 1 month ago

Limbesdautomne

Perhaps someday I'll have a nice girl friend with chromed hips who will yell choo-choo when I tickle her whistle. IAwohl !… Welcome in GarGarLand.

Read more in French on La Saveur des goûts amers.

6 years 2 months ago

BigAwesomeBLT

Loved the first hour. Liked how it developed in the second hour, although a bit rushed at the end. Thought Domhnall Gleeson would be a robot. His accent was a bit dodgy and didn't need to be American. Oscar Isaac has made me feel uncomfortable in every film I've seen him.

8 years 11 months ago

The_Comatorium

Let me start off by saying that I’m extremely happy for Alex Garland. I’ve been a fan of his since 28 Days Later. His stories, while flawed at times, always strike me as interesting and unique. His novels and short stories such as The Coma have inspired some of my short story writing that I do independent of this website. I’m a fan. I was excited to hear he had directed a film and even more excited that his film is doing so well. It only means we’ll be seeing more of his mind on screen soon enough.

That being said, I loved the film.

There’s something about tiny films that appeal to me. Alien is a much better horror film than it’s sequel Aliens to me. Why? There’s less space to move around. It all takes place on the ship and deals with one alien. It’s more personal…intimate. Aliens is a fine film, but it’s more of a Terminator 2 type of film where they took what was great about the first film and then turned it up to eleven. Ex Machina is an intimate film. It takes place mainly in one location, the multi million dollar estate of Nathan, the CEO of Bluebook. Bluebook is basically the combination of Facebook and Google so right off the bat you know how rich and smart the man is. Caleb is a programmer working for Bluebook and wins a contest sending him to his boss’s home. There we find out that Nathan has built an AI and that Caleb was brought there to test it.

The first scene of the film is brilliant. It doesn’t meander around who Caleb is or what exactly this company does. We learn that later as the film progresses. We’re given a 30 second dialogue free set up and away we go into the world of this house and it’s inhabitants. I just love how that was done. Garland and his DP really took their time with the aesthetics of this house. It’s obviously a very modernized home with the latest and sometimes one of a kind technology. Garland makes sure to hold the camera at precise points to vaguely foreshadow certain plot twists later in the film. I love films that I can watch a second time and catch new things. I haven’t seen it a 2nd time yet, but I’m going to. There are so many points in the beginning of the film that can be recalled later in the film as being significant. I think that may be the best highlight of the entire film for me. It’s just so tight and clean, just like every inch of Nathan’s house. The dialogue between all three inhabitants is sharp, often funny, and always engrossing. Once Caleb finds out why he is there, the real show begins.

Alicia Vikander.

Yeah, I wasn’t aware she was a thing either. That’s changed. She was fantastic in this. It should be taken with a grain of salt however because her performance isn’t something flashy or grandiose. This is a small and quite performance. Most of the time we see her as Ava, we see her bare robotic body with just the front half of her face. Vikander was tasked with portraying the emotion and thought processes of a robot using only her facial expressions. This is why I find her performance so good. She was able to draw me in so well and actually believe that she was an AI with her own conscious and intelligence. Her sessions with Gleason were engrossing to watch.

Has Oscar Isaac just become my favorite actor? That’s hard to say, but he’s certainly in the discussion now. I think I can safely say that both he and Michael Fassbender are the future of male actors. They have not been in a bad film, not delivered a bad performance, and have pretty much been getting better with each role. He’s able to portray Nathan as somebody who you seem to like judging by the way he talks to Caleb, but somebody who you just don’t seem to trust. He reminds me of Jack Torrance before he went crazy in The Shining. Even in the beginning of the film you can tell something is off. Something just isn’t right about him. His drunk scenes were the best and may have been in the greatest dance scene I’ve seen in a long time. His co-star Domhnall Gleeson is solid but really takes a back seat to Vikander and Isaac here. I feel her started to skip towards the end of the film. It may have to do with the circumstances his character got into, but I just wasn’t with him towards the end.

That’s the gist of the film. What I haven’t talked about, and will dance lightly around, is the way the story progresses. There are scenes in with I was on the edge of my seat, not from excitement, but from pure envelopment of the story. It lured me in. It had my full focus. I didn’t check my phone to see what time it was. I didn’t wonder what I was going to do after the show. I was just fully enveloped in this tightly written sci-fi. There is a lot to discuss at the end of the film. Who was the villain here? Did so an so deserve what happened to them? I’m still not entirely sure who’s side I’m on. That’s what a great screenplay does for me. Makes me question myself.

It’s my film of the year so far. It provoked a lot of interesting theories as far as creation goes. It made me more afraid of the future than I already am. It provides two incredible performances from Vikander and Isaac and needs to be seen for the dance scene alone. I’m glad it came out when it did because it’s going to be buried by Avengers, but if you’re trying to see a film and want to duck around the Marvel crowds, this is your film. It’s one of the better sci-fi films to come out in some time and is a wonderful sign that Alex Garland will be making thought provoking films for a long time.

4.5/5

www.thoughtsfromthebooth.com
@booththoughts

8 years 11 months ago

ikkegoemikke

"The challenge is not to act automatically. It's to find an action that is not automatic. From painting, to breathing, to talking, to f*cking. To falling in love... "

Something that really fascinates me, is whether we'll ever be able to develop artificial intelligence. Each film about this subject gets my complete attention anyway and can count on my unconditional enthusiasm. I don't know why and what attracts me the most in those movies. Is it just curiosity about the question if someone will ever succeed in developing such a machine? Will artificial intelligence cause the downfall of humanity as some prominent scientists profess (Hawking for instance claims this) ? Is such a self-discursive machine capable of showing real feelings and respond in a human way? And after seeing the packaging of this artificially intelligent creature, which looked enormously appetizing to me, the whole spectacle couldn't go wrong anyway.

The list of movies with this topic is fairly extensive: from "Blade Runner" to "AI", "I Robot" and "Short Circuit", "Robocop" and recently "Chappie". Even Pixar's "Wall-E" fits in this list. Recent movies I liked the most were "The Machine" and of course "Her". In this last movie it's a sultry, seductive voice that represents the philosophy of AI. Unfortunately, most films contain excellent material for the prophets of doom in this world to say that AI isn't exactly something we're waiting for. Usually it goes horribly wrong and the creation turns against its human designer in order to get the balance of power tilted into its direction. I think this is the ultimate proof of AI but at the same time I don't think it's supposed to end that way. "Ex Machina" is no exception to this rule.

It all starts when Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) receives an e-mail at the end of the week saying that he has won a sleepover at his boss's residence. The moment he arrives on the immense estate and enters the modern underground house of Nathan (Oscar Isaac), he doesn't know that he has been selected to submit the latest creation from Nathan to extensive testing. He's introduced to Ava (Alicia Vikander), designed by the eccentric billionaire, and he must investigate during 5 days, using a Turing test, if Ava actually expresses and uses human feelings. But nothing is what is seems and at some point you're really wondering who's on the test bench! Looking at this movie in its entirety, you won't easily conclude that this is a low budget film and that they succeeded, despite the low budget, in creating an impressive environment and atmosphere. The ultra-modern property of Nathan comes with high-tech gadgets and looks tight , sober, cold and sterile with an ingenious verification system, design furniture scattered around and ambient lighting which is activated automatically or via voice control. There's an internal video monitoring system and apparently a fortune was spent on the power supply, although occasionally the system is failing. And then there is the phenomenon Ava who eerily resembles a wandering robot, even though you realize it's played by an actress, complete with arms with sophisticated wiring and a skull with partly a humanly face and a kind of electronic system. The way the brain looks like and works is something I've never seen so far in SF. It demonstrates an original approach to the effective development of AI.

The next issue are the performances. This is naturally limited to the three main characters: Nathan, Caleb and Ava. Oscar Isaac manages to portray Nathan in a very convincing way. A phenomenal intellectual character who has separated itself from civilization. This complete isolation has caused quite some bizarre features. From the outset, you have the feeling there's something wrong and Nathan takes a menacing pose. His unpredictable moods, the alcohol consumption and the rather perverse sexual fantasies transform this genius into an unstable-looking person. The alleged prizewinner Caleb, played by Domhnall Gleeson who previously starred in "About time", seems to have a rational mind, but eventually appears to be rather naive. The dialogues between him and Nathan are on a high philosophical level and include mostly the resulting gaps after creating artificial life. Caleb also has highly interesting conversations with Ava. And Ava impressed me the most. Alicia Vikander, a professional ballet dancer, succeeds in (with the use of CGI) looking like a real human-like cyborg. The astonished facial expression and prudent movements are some of the most sublime performances that makes her believable as Ava.

What remains is the storyline and plot used in this SF. Undeniably, it's a psychological thriller in which everyone apparently has a hidden secret agenda, full of secrets and manipulative motives. And to be honest, the ending was a bit of a disappointment. However, the run up is magnificent, despite some considerations. At first it seems implausible to me that Nathan, despite his intellectual level, could develop something like Ava completely on his own. That means he's also a master in other branches of natural science (chemistry, mechanics, electronics, biochemistry ...). And I suppose he knows the laws of Isaac Asimov. Shouldn't he consider these and take his precautions ? As in "Her" we witness a relationship between a human and a semi-human, except that Ava uses the highlighting of her female forms in her favor. And Ava uses these qualities just like women all over the world do to achieve their goal. I'm sure that's true AI !

More reviews here : http://bit.ly/1KIdQMT

8 years 11 months ago