Film Discussion: Ex Machina

Ex Machina is the brainchild of British writer/director Alex Garland, a novelist who showed his screenwriting chops with the chilling 28 Days Later and the ingenious (but largely ignored) sci-fi thriller Sunshine. I’d have to say that I like the way Garland’s mind works, based on those samples.

Ex Machina brings a young programmer (probably naïve) to the very private mountain lab of a very rich businessman (probably a little cracked) who has been working on the AI problem and has produced a robot called Ava, who’s clearly mechanical (in part) and yet manages to be very female.

Let’s see, two men, one “woman,” who’s designed to pass for human, and a closed environment. What could go wrong?

I hope you’ll join me to find out. The critics have been saying all the right things about Ex Machina, leading me to hope for a genuine science-fiction thriller, with some intelligence (both artificial and natural) thrown in for good measure.

And it should make for a very interesting discussion!

Finally, if you’re marking up your dance card for the rest of July, be sure to write the discussions of I’ll See You In My Dreams (Tuesday, July 21) and Far From the Madding Crowd (Tuesday, July 28) down in ink. They’re both first rate, with Dreams presenting the rare and valuable opportunity to spend time with star Blythe Danner, a luminous actress who doesn’t work as often as I’d like.

See you tomorrow. 7:00pm in The Music Hall’s Historic Theater.

Paul Goodwin

TMHMG

Editor’s note: For further reading, see Trevor Bartlett’s review in The Sound