Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

Ex Machina

Ex Machina is the movie equivalent of a bully grabbing your wrist and repeatedly punching you in the face with your own hand while saying, "Stop hitting yourself." over and over again. 

Quit it, Hollywood!  Gawd! 

And just like Biff from Back to the Future or Scut Farkus from A Christmas Story (Yeah, it's not "Scott Farkas."  Blew my fucking mind, too.), Ex Machina is going to turn out to be a big, dumb, balding, pot-bellied, wife-beatin' loser.  It'll get rerun on Syfy at 3:00 AM on Sundays, and only stoned high school kids and the demented elderly will be suckered by its metal-and-glass-exact production design and Samuel Morse'd twist ending into thinking it has anything meaningful to say.

Seriously, unless you're some kind of aboriginal jungle-dweller who's never come into contact with the modern world, you'll see the two "big" reveals as well as the "surprise" ending coming a parsec away.

Nathan (Oscar "I'm an ACTOR" Isaac), the billionaire inventor of the equivalent of Google, lives in an enormous house-of-tomorrow/research facility about 500 miles past BFE.  He's created what could be the first truly artificially intelligent creature, Ava (Alicia "Swiss Miss" Vikander), which, of course, looks like a geek's uber-fuckable wet dream.  Nathan helicopters one of his employees, Caleb (Domhnall "Bill Weasley" Gleeson), out for a week so that Caleb can perform a modified Turing Test on Ava to prove whether she is truly AI and not merely faking her experiential orgasms, so to speak.

Hilarity does not ensue.  Nor does the provocation of thought, the inspiration of wonder or much by way of anything in the same fucking phylum as entertainment.  And the plot's got more loopholes than an afghan.

Like Nathan, Ex Machina thinks it's the smartest thing in the room.  It name checks Kurzweil and his Singularity, Oppenheimer and his "destroyer of worlds" quote, Prometheus and Pollock in an effort to impress its likely dozing audience.  The problem is that it's actually as deep as a shot glass and as complex as the brain-teasers in Highlights magazine.

It not only acts like Asimov never came down from the technological mount and delivered the Three Laws of Robotics to mankind, it expects us to believe its genius inventor is such a dipshit that he wouldn't have come up with something similar on the way to creating the first walking, talking, squirting sex bot.

Given how much of the Interwebs are dedicated to porn, at least Ex Machina gets one thing right.  The first question guys ask about any new discovery is always some form of "Can I fuck it?"  It's as clear as Ava's see through torso why Vikander and not, say, Rebel Wilson got the part. 

But even Vikander's circuit-melting hotness can't save Ex Machina from its own logic errors and more-obvious-than-forehead-nipples ending. 

Error: Inverted 58008.  Climax not found.

April 26, 2015