¾ Ex Machina
(R)A computer programmer named Caleb Smith, who works for a search engine company called Blue Book, apparently wins a contest to spend the week at the reclusive home of the company's CEO, Nathan Bateman. Soon after Caleb arrives, Nathan reveals that he was actually selected to be part of a Turing test, to determine if an artificial intelligence Nathan had created, named Ava, has truly crossed the threshold into a human level of self-awareness, and whatnot. The idea of the Turing test, which was developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is something I've been at least vaguely aware of since... I dunno, somewhere between the late 80s and mid 90s. And I must have read or seen fictional examples of the Test in various stories, shows, and/or movies, over the years. So it's not like I was going into this movie expecting anything truly revolutionary, storywise. Still, it was well-reviewed by critics, and it certainly looked cool. And of course movie plots don't have to be entirely original to be both entertaining and thought-provoking. So I expected to enjoy it. And I guess I did, but maybe not quite as much as I might have hoped. I wouldn't exactly say I found it disappointing, but... whatever my problem with it is probably my own fault. There were certain possible plot twists I spent most of the movie waiting to find out if they'd happen or not... and for the most part, they didn't. (Well, one did, I guess, but I found it so obvious that I would have actually considered it more of a twist if it didn't happen. Besides which it didn't even seem to me as if the twist particularly mattered to the main plot, one way or the other. One of the potential twists I would have been more interested in did come to be suspected by one of the characters, but that one didn't pan out at all.)
Anyway... the movie consists of conversations between Caleb and Nathan, and conversations between Caleb and Ava. Predictably enough, Caleb and Ava begin to develop... it's hard to say what to call it. A tentative friendship, but with potential romantic overtones (or undertones), all wrapped up in the complicated nature of why they were interacting in the first place (which represented an unequal power dynamic between human and robot, since Caleb supposedly had more knowledge of what was going on than Ava did, besides which Ava herself was essentially a captive with no rights). And to top it off, there's the question of what Nathan's true motives are, and whether or not Caleb can actually trust anything he says. (Or for that matter, whether he can trust anything Ava says.) So... it's something of a tangled narrative, but a compelling one. Of course, I'm not going to spoil anything about how it all ends.
In a way, I find it refreshing that none of my major plot twist predictions came to pass. It's generally fun when I do guess correctly about movie twists, but it would get boring if I always did. So while part of me feels a bit cheated that the movie was never really more than it seemed (at least on a certain level), another part of me appreciates that if part of the fun you're looking for in a movie (or any story format) is a mystery, the actual nature of that mystery can take various forms. One of them being not so much "what's going to happen?" as, on a larger scale, "what kind of movie am I even watching?" And I think I might have had somewhat more fun if, from the beginning, I'd thought of it more as film noir than sci-fi, or thriller, or mindscrew, or whatever. I do think the movie has some interesting scientific and sort of philosophical ideas, but I couldn't help feeling that it was only moderately successful on that level. And as I said before, the fact that I felt it failed as a mystery is my fault; it's impossible for me to judge how well or poorly it truly performed on that level, since I was too preoccupied with my own predictions, and unfairly blame the story for not really going in those directions. But, man, as film noir (albeit one that doesn't look the part), I think it succeeded quite well.