Every conversation he has, online or in person, will be monitored. He forces Caleb to sign an NDA that gives up any right to privacy for at least a year. His name is Nathan ( Oscar Isaac), and he’s working on something new that’s more top secret than top secret. His eccentricities extend to a bald head and burly man beard, and he continues with all the social ease of a pitbull around a collie. In a gorgeously filmed sequence absent of almost any dialogue, Caleb wins an elite VIP trip to visit the eccentric and reclusive genius CEO that invented BlueBook at age 13. Ex Machina is the first great film of 2015.ĭomhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, an up-and-coming computer programmer who works at a company stand-in for Google called BlueBook. More an opera of ideas than a production of action, violence, or deafeningly loud melodrama, questions are asked but rarely answered.

Some have cried out against some goofy plot problems, but this is exactly the sort of work where that’s what matters least. Ex Machina is a 108-minute argument that proves that idea wrong. It’s a sci-fi staple easy to think has been expired of fresh possibilities. The singularity, or “technological singularity”, is the moment in time when artificial intelligence, A.I., will surpass human intellect as well as control. No, not the singularity at the heart of a black hole. It’s a complex, haunting, and beautiful work that’s a spiritual sequel to 2013’s excellent Her, puzzling over the sooner-than-we-think discovery of the singularity. It’s a brave move I like to think was motivated by art more than a small budget, a benefit of the doubt that by Ex Machina’s end writer and director Alex Garland has certainly earned. Ex Machina starts small, and where it easily could’ve gone the way of gatling guns and transforming robots with laser beam vision, it ends small too.

Ex machina screenplay online