Review: Ex-machina

Ex-Machina

Ex-Machina is a 100 minute science fiction film directed by Alex Garland, it stars Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac. A programmer is called in for an experiment involving a newly designed cyborg; however her creator may have something to hide.  

Going into this left me rather unsure, Gleeson, a good actor I find is still in his father’s shadow and I found it hard to warm up to Isaac in two faces of January, knowing that the Sunshine writer worked on this left my apprehensive about the ending but I felt more mixed when I learnt he wrote 28 days later and never let me go, expectations then were decent.
This film, divided me. On one hand I am happy to see a rarity of cyberpunk storytelling in post 80s cinema, that it went the social science fiction route works in its favour (although wholly unoriginal),Gleeson has finally been given a vehicle that allows him to do something and enough suspicion is built and cast around, on Oscar Isaacs character to remain invested in him, it makes good use of its build up and the payoff proves to be worth it in the end, it goes into the humane aspects of the genre decently enough and it takes all of the unsettling nature of never let me go while Garland avoids the mistakes he ran into when he capped off sunshine and twenty eight days with their mediocre endings in otherwise perfectly watchable films , delivering a solid last act. He also uses the washed out visuals, limited characters and location to create as the film itself states, a sense of immersion and claustrophobia. The script is a mixed affair winning out by avoiding convolutions of the genre but   fall short in the exchanges between the two leads which feel stilted in the dialogue at times. The plot dances between surprising the viewer and outright predictability and testing the viewer’s patience.
In the end it’s an uneven film that compares weakly to the rest of the directors catalogue but offers just enough to be worth seeing but is too sloppy to be anything more than good, when it had what it took to be something more.

Verdict: ***