If

I like Casey Johnston’s writing, but she completely and utterly did not understand the point of Ex Machina at all, in any way.

If she watched it and got that out of it, she viewed it like most men would/did.

The strange thing is the article writer she linked to actually did understand the film.

Ex Machina is less kind: both the openly unlikeable tyrant Bateman and his would-be protege, Caleb, are familiar Silicon Valley caricatures who awkwardly fumble through workouts and whiskeys together. The viewer may even be lulled into believing that Caleb, a goofy, tousled “nice guy” who decides to rescue Ava from the hairy grasp of her creator, deserves to ride off into the sunset with her, a token of his victory over the more dystopian, overtly misogynistic Bateman.

Apparently, Johnston indeed was lulled into belief, but I don’t blame her — most Americans are not used to watching films that have multiple intended layers of meaning. There just aren’t many made like that any longer.

Ex Machina is probably the best movie of the past decade, so it makes sense that most people would not understand it (usually takes 10-15 years for a film like that to sink in).