Ex Machina

*"Question three. Are you a good person?"* 10 years since this released! cemented its place as one of my most beloved movies of the 21st century. the viewer's perspective feels so different on a rewatch, the central thread of misogyny and the objectification of women felt a lot more apparent besides the more obvious existential commentary on artificial consciousness. i feel very lucky to have seen this both before and after the AI boom ever since the public release of chatGPT - Nathan revealing that Ava was trained on essentially the entire internet reminded me shockingly of how the current LLMs have been trained in a similar way... i remember loving the soundtrack back when i first watched this, but i had no idea that it was done in part by geoff barrow of portishead! the atmospheric work he did with ben salisbury on this is remarkable i also can't talk enough about how good oscar isaacs is in this, it's truly frightening how he disappears into the role and becomes this charicature of a modern tech ceo - except it's hardly a charicature when you look at the likes of musk with neuralink and altman desperately trying to turn openAI into for-profit alicia vikander is really special, Ava feels like a character with more depth and intricacies than the humans in this, and sonoya mizuno equally is haunting - the dance floor scene stands out as being easy to dismiss as a light relief scene but imo it reveals so much about Caleb, Nathan and Kyoko in particular, her suffering masked behind imitating the dance cues of her 'master' domnhall gleeson is fantastic too, portraying this flawed protagonist who seems to be the foil to Nathan but is really not as different to him as it first appears finally, the way this film looks and feels in general is so intoxicating - constantly cutting to exterior shots portraying the lush landscape that is out of reach for Ava sharply contrasts the stark, claustrophobic lighting of the mansion complex (filmed at Juvet Landscape Hotel, i had no idea) - and the meticulously crafted cgi is so understated yet effective