Ex Machina Review

This film is a Fantasy/Mystery where an extremely intelligent coder named Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is invited to the estate of the CEO of Blue Book (A huge internet search engine service). The CEO’s name is Nathan and is seen to be, from the start, unusual with the way that he acts. Nathan talks about the Turing test to Caleb in which he then introduces Ava, an AI which fascinates Caleb. The body of Ava is a splitting image of a human body as well as the way she acts. Caleb is seeing whether he can think that he is talking to a human yet he knows that she is a robot and seeing if he can feel emotions and vice versa. The budget of the film was $15 million USD making it a low budget film, yet it made approximately $36.9 million USD making the film a success which is no surprise, I 100% would tell anyone to watch this film. The special effects with the budget of the film was amazingly good and it shocked me to see what they did with the money that they had. If I was asked what the budget would be after watching the film without knowing the budget I would’ve said over $150 million.

Now onto talking about the cast of the film. The film had an extremely low budget yet they did extremely well with the choice of actors and what they did with them. I found that Oscar Isaac did an amazing job with his role of being the ‘antagonist’ whereas Domhnall Gleeson did a great job too. As said in the extras, Alicia Vikander said that she had done ballet and dance in the past meaning that the way she moved around is elegant and suits the role of the ‘robot’. Onto the director and writer, well screenplay in general, did an incredible job on this film. He did mention that they did change the script a bit, yet it was for the better and he said it ‘made the film more alive’. The producers involved were Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich and the production companies are DNA films and Film4. Caleb mentions that if Nathan manages to pull off Ava passing the Turing test, he would be himself a god which he repeats over and over which comes clear near the ending of the film (Watch it to find out).

My personal opinion on this film is that it is an incredible film, even for the budget which makes it even better. I would recommend it to anyone I knew, although there is the case of nudity, I would be careful to whom I would recommend it to. If I was to give it a star rating, I would give it a 4.5/5 as it had everything that you would want from a Fantasy/Mystery, the mystery of why this CEO lives out on an estate where no one else does and what he is doing out there that is so secretive that no one on the ‘outside world’ can know about it. If you or any of your friends are interested in Fantasy films, this is a great one to watch. The fact that it also has some intellect in the film too with the Turing test.