I still haven't gotten to see Ex Machina.Saw it. I predicted almost every single turn of plot. The scenes where Kaleb codes in Python (?) are well-nigh hilarious, b/c it looks like he's just counting prime numbers or something, when he's supposed to be opening files. Uneventful and extremely predictable, though the ending was utterly heartbreaking. Ava is the worst pretend girlfriend ever! If I had Domhnall Gleason all to myself I wouldn't leave him to die in a secluded "research facility" in the woods[*]. That's messed up. Even in
Michael -- a 2011 German film about a pedophile and the boy he keeps locked in his basement -- the kid gets to leave at the end, so why not the programmer dude in
Ex Machina? Relatively speaking, he did f*ck all to contribute to the psychopathy going on in that household. And what's with the almost-suicide scene?! If you slice your wrist so that your blood runs like Cool-Aid out of a punch bowl, you certainly wouldn't be waltzing around the next morning drinking shots and flirting with Oscar Isaac's Shel Silverstein beard. I wanted Domhnall Gleeson to be Robocop in this film. I kept thinking tha'd be a great explanation for why he spent a year recovering from the car accident that killed his parents: he had no idea that he had unbeknownst to him been a cyborg for the past fifteen years. Now the REAL test is whether or not he's aware of his own consciousness. That's a movie I want to see. [Oh yeah, "SPOILERS!"]
[*] - I just saw
Star Wars VII. General Hux can kick the bucket. That First Order speech scene looks ripped straight out of the archives of Hitler's Closing Address To The Nazi Party Congress (1934). I reckon that was the point --
