Feels like Ex Machina if it was written by a twelve year-old who read one Isaac Asimov short story and was like, "Ooo! I want to write sci-fi!"
I can see how this movie would seem smart and original to people who haven't experienced good sci-fi. It would be like taking candy corn to a remote tribe untouched by mankind and them loving it for its exquisite sweetness. However, anyone who has read more than a couple quality sci-fi books or has adequate experience with the genre will see how weak, unintelligent, contradictory, and overall amateur the screenplay is. Direction is fine, acting is fine, CG is decent, it's just the script that sucks. Here's an example...
The main girl's relationship with the AI and her journey of convincing it that it's human and giving it emotions is extremely flawed and doesn't follow any logical or meaningful route to how AI would go from point A to B. It's pretty much, "I'm going to inflict pain on you!" "Wait! You're a person and we're friends!" "Oh, really? Let me break all my instructions and parameters and believe everything you say now." That's just lazy. The security holes in the "AI" would be so bad that they're not even sensible in any stretch of the imagination. Good sci-fi would establish its learning parameters and let her use them to curve it to her will. Instead she just teaches it flatly like a child who takes her every word at face value (with several cutesy montages of then buddying up). Mind you, she knows nothing about it or how it learns while the man who DESIGNED it has absolutely no success in training it back despite his thorough understanding of how it thinks, learns, and operates. Like I said, crappy sci-fi.
I can see how this movie would seem smart and original to people who haven't experienced good sci-fi. It would be like taking candy corn to a remote tribe untouched by mankind and them loving it for its exquisite sweetness. However, anyone who has read more than a couple quality sci-fi books or has adequate experience with the genre will see how weak, unintelligent, contradictory, and overall amateur the screenplay is. Direction is fine, acting is fine, CG is decent, it's just the script that sucks. Here's an example...
The main girl's relationship with the AI and her journey of convincing it that it's human and giving it emotions is extremely flawed and doesn't follow any logical or meaningful route to how AI would go from point A to B. It's pretty much, "I'm going to inflict pain on you!" "Wait! You're a person and we're friends!" "Oh, really? Let me break all my instructions and parameters and believe everything you say now." That's just lazy. The security holes in the "AI" would be so bad that they're not even sensible in any stretch of the imagination. Good sci-fi would establish its learning parameters and let her use them to curve it to her will. Instead she just teaches it flatly like a child who takes her every word at face value (with several cutesy montages of then buddying up). Mind you, she knows nothing about it or how it learns while the man who DESIGNED it has absolutely no success in training it back despite his thorough understanding of how it thinks, learns, and operates. Like I said, crappy sci-fi.