Verdict: ★★ 1/2

I thought about this review for a couple of days before actually writing it. When I first saw Ex Machina’s trailer I figured it was just another motion capture CGI gig that Andy Serkis made so popular with his extraordinary talent behind Gollum and King Kong. Drop an actor or actress into a suit with dots all over it and add ILM’s magic wand and holy cats… you’ve got anything you want walking around!

I was wrong. It’s worse. Code monkey Caleb (a rather rough looking Domhnall Gleeson) wins a week long stay with his extraordinarily reclusive CEO and founder of the company he works for, Nathan (a surprisingly bearded Oscar Issac). The moment he’s sitting in front of his computer and just finding out he won, we see his face being scanned by something from the web cam, his reaction, his every nuance of expression. This foreshadowing work sets up the feeling that Caleb is being watched, and if he is… aren’t we all? Immediately, I was suspended in the belief that, in the movie, I have no privacy and as such, I felt immediately unsettled.

Caleb’s flown out to an estate that makes Alaska look like the corner under the tree in my backyard, dropped off in the middle of a field and told to “follow the river” which he does so in his business suit and patent leather shoes. Tromping through the setting for Jurassic Park, Caleb finally finds a “door” without having been attacked by velociraptors, and he has to search the entire premises to find his host. The first thing this ultra-rich CEO/Founder of the greatest search engine on the web says to him is “Dude!”

Seriously? Nathan turns out to be nothing more than a fratboy without the frat. Gets drunk on a daily basis, yells at his maid with generic, store-bought douchebaggery and talks as if he hates tech lingo. Turns out Caleb has been selected (by winning) to participate in a very important test… to see if the newest model of AI android technology can convince him it has a consciousness.

Enter Ava (an astonishingly disarming Alicia Vikander), an android who only has facial expressions to convince Caleb she’s just this side of human, because the rest of her, with the exception of her hands and feet, is robot. And by “facial expressions” I mean, she tries not to smile while asking very basic questions of Caleb while trapped in a single room plexiglass prison.

My confliction with this movie is that it’s horribly depressing. I’ll put it bluntly. This movie is like watching a happy child suddenly drop his ice cream and start crying, only with awesome CGI. There’s not one part of this movie that actually offers any spark of hope, excitement or romantic anticipation. What has every red-blooded male nerd dreamt of in the history of nerddom? I’ll give you three guesses but if the first one is “a girl robot to take to the prom”, you’ve won. This movie could have been so much more than what it was, for much wider of an audience. Instead, Caleb is a depressed guy who wins a depressing week’s stay with his DB boss and is forced to administer a depressing psych test on a depressed robot.

The reason why I’m conflicted is because this movie is also surprisingly artsy. With such a simple plotline and generic acting, writer/director Alex Garland (28 Days Later, Dredd) delivers an astonishingly thought-provoking idea while punching it home with a twist I should have seen coming, but didn’t. Again… the conflict: It works very well but made my emotions roil in a pot as if about to receive a box of mac-n-cheese noodles. I actually had to drink after the show to make myself feel better, but man… it had me going. I was mad, depressed, and yet respectful of Garland’s vision here.

Ex Machina adds to the AI/android phenomenon with a marvelously bland recipe.