Ex Machina is definitely a tighter, smaller focus film and often I'd be more down for that. But aesthetically and in terms of its ideas, it very much felt like something I had encountered many iterations of before in science fiction stories and TV and movies and the like.
This felt a lot fresher to me, and I appreciated the level of execution relative to the major bump up in scale, especially when $55 million is not what I'd call a big budget for a movie of this nature. There's obvious influences on it, sure (the book, Asimov's "Green Patches," Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, Tarkovsky's Stalker, Cronenberg's eXistenZ, 2001: A Space Odyssey, John Carpenter's The Thing, Alien, Arrival, Fulci and Argento, Giger, Lisa Frank, again, The Search for Spock) but it is such a hybrid of so many very different things and really combines them rather seamlessly--in keeping with the movie one could say that it refracts the very DNA of its art/lit/film predecessors--it ends up feeling like something new and unique.
I also found that this film really works on several different levels, be it drama, adventure, horror, action thriller, mood piece, thought-provoker, and so on. The visceral and conceptual function of Ex Machina felt more limited to me. It's basically an idea movie, and since the ideas felt a bit rote to me as a sci-fi fan, I never got a lot out of it. Whereas I am not sure I've ever seen a genre movie really focus in on our biological/psychological programming towards self-destruction and then find a way, through science fiction, to elaborate on that idea and develop it towards a conclusion that is simultaneously devastating and transcendent.
The moment the film's title is spoken and what immediately happens after... that's going to say burned into my memory for a long time. I really felt this film give new meaning and a different emotional context to the idea of annihilation. It takes both the language and physics definitions of the word, and finds a powerfully resonant middle-ground for them both, a hybrid definition whose truth you can feel. This is something only art can do.
an·ni·hi·la·tion
??n???l?SH?n/
noun
1.
complete destruction or obliteration.
"the threat of global annihilation"
2.
PHYSICS
the conversion of matter into energy, especially the mutual conversion of a particle and an antiparticle into electromagnetic radiation.
. And the acting was great too. Especially Tessa Thompson who played a very different type of role than she usually plays. I was genuinely surprised how well she played it.
