Film Review: Ex_Machina (15) (U.S.A./U.K. 2015) (Director: Alex Garland), The Cameo Cinema Screen One, Edinburgh, Sunday 25.01.2015 17:40

This is a triple-hander of a film. The three central characters being a C.E.O. of a search engine company, one of his low-level employees and this 'artificial intelligence' that the C.E.O. has created called Ava. The CEO having invited the employee to his secluded residence to be part of a 'Turing test', where he is to interact with the machine and detect if he can at some point loose the sense of it being an artificial being. 

I was drawn to the film due to it's visual style, which did not disappoint. Sadly the rest of the film was a bit of a let-down. There is a supposed twist towards the end, though I felt the films progression to be fairly clear and guessable from the start. 

It is not to spoil anything to say that  the employee reaches a point of seeing the machine as having consciousness. How is this possible when all of the machine's drawings throughout the film are clearly hexagon based. Also the machine's facial micro-expressions are always slightly stilted and therefore clearly not human. This is clearly down to good acting, though it does make other characters look a bit stupid. Maybe this is part of the point. Maybe the film is trying to say that if you put an attractive face on anything then (horny) man will not notice these little things, as they don't fit the reality the man wants to see. Emotion overrules intelligence. This is a film I would neither recommend nor try to dissuade others from trying to see. 

Rating: 06/10.