Ex Machina Review

This film is one that captured me in many different ways as there are a number of different themes shown within this film. Sci-fi, gender equality and male gaze were explored during this film. I found this film very hard to understand due to the extreme technical language that was placed inside of the film. There was a lot of language that people that may have studied this or explored before would understand and these parts of the film for me were very unenjoyable. The storyline of the film was very intriguing and the ending was one that I would never have expected to have happened and this left me in shock and wanting more form the film, which for me, is a very attractive quality in a film.

The 3 main members of the cast and the 4^th, who was just a minor character but still played a very important part were: Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac and Sonoya Mizuno, Sonoya Mizuno being the 4^th minor character. These actors and actresses have been seen in big budget films, such as Star Wars the Force Awakens, as well as smaller budget films such as this one as well. This shows that they can take part in a variety of different films and relate and be able to receive an understanding from many different audiences. All of these characters were accepted and were easy to understand and they played a very persuading role.

Alex Garland wrote this film and directed it also and he has also written films such as: Dredd, Never Let Me Go and 28 Days Later. These are all well recognised film and all have reviews above a 50% like rate on a review website. This does show that he is an effective film write and his films can be enjoyed by all.

The film was produced by Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich and they have also gone on to produce films such as: 27 Days Later and Dredd alongside Alex Garland so this does show, by the ratings, that they work well together when creating a film and their films are well recognised and enjoyed by many.

There are many ethical and moral questions that can come from this film and the main one of this would be: What our future will entail as Humans. There are questions that are being asked such as: Will these robots in the future wipe out the face of Humans? What our future will be? And if this film entails what will happen in the future? These points have sparked discussion in many audiences and in some cases, have caused concern among people.

This film is based around Neuroscience and the art of coding and this is something that Alex Garland has known about and experimented with since a very young age. He gained influences from films such as: A space of Odyssey, Altered States and books written by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He made the film on the smallest budget possible as he wanted “total creative freedom” and not have to add action sequences. There were no special effects when shooting as it was shot like ordinary live action and this meant that there were no green screens or tracking markers needed when they filmed this. All effects were done when the post-production stage came along. As special effects were needed for Alicia’s character, they did this with filming scenes with and without her in which allowed the background to be factored in at the same time. Using CGI, they were able to transfer her movements into more robotic movements and were able to add sound effects in to make her character seem more robotic. There were 800 VFX shots and 350 of these were robot shots. Visual effects were also needed when events such as Nathan’s stabbing and Ava having a transparent body were shown.

Overall, this film was very enjoyable and was very intriguing due to the plot and the ending being left on a cliffhanger.