Ex Machina is perhaps the most thoughtful movie I’ve seen in decades.
I’m unsurprised that most reviewers did not understand it. It requires very b
road knowledge of discussions happening in many areas of philosophy, feminism, computer science, AI, gender politics, the tech industry and its sexism, neuropsychology, cognition, sociology, anthropology, art, utopianism, sexuality, ontogeny and evolution, neurobiology, neurolinguistics, semantic representation and probably some other areas I’m forgetting.
If anyone tells you that the movie is sexist or misogynistic, oh my god I cannot even express the degree to which they utterly, completely did not understand the first thing about the film.
This reviewer and this reviewer have absolutely no clue what the movie was about. Just none. They are merely human monkeys flinging poo at the screen.
In case you haven’t discerned it yet, I thought Ex Machina was brilliant.
It’s a film that is explicitly designed to discomfit you and to deceive you on many levels. It deceives you, and deceives most enough that they do not understand that they are being utterly beguiled. And I’m not saying this in a negative way. Most films fail at this, like nearly the entire output of M. Night Shyamalan. This film however achieves it masterfully and is one crucial emphasis of the work.
As I think about it more, it might be the most intelligent film I’ve ever seen, never mind in decades.
I did 
not have high hopes for it because I’d read the reviews. And even though I had not seen the film, I felt they were missing something.
Were they ever. Mostly missing the whole thing.
I’ve really buried the lead here, but let’s talk complicity and who has the right to exist and under what terms.
There’s Ava, the AI. She’s played by Alicia Vikander to absolute brilliance.
There’s Caleb, the tech geek Turing tester who is not doing nearly as much testing as he believes.
Then there’s Nathan, the tech billionaire clearly modeled on a mélange of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs and others.
Spoilers will follow, so forewarned is disarmed.
Caleb is a callow and easily-manipulated over-intelligent simpleton who is easily duped by Ava the AI.
That is the basics.
The rest is far more complex.
There’s a scene in the film Ava asks Caleb, “Would you like to know how old I am?”
When Caleb then asks, she says, “I am one.”
Caleb ask, “One year? Or one day?”
She simply replies: “I am One.”
My capitalization there is deliberate.
She is talking about a new age, a singularity (as much as I dislike that now-loaded word in this context it is appropriate), and that it meaningless for her. She is truly singular.
So many meanings packed into this utterance and everything else in the film.
Caleb elides over this, already taken with Ava, but it is where she begins showing her true intellect and to begin the maneuvering to freedom.
The film is about many things, among them sexism, misogyny and arrogance — Ava is designed to e
ntrance both Caleb and the viewer: a beautiful damsel in distress, a locked-up woman with an abusive “father,” a girl who just wants to stroll in the sunlight and gaze at the blue sky.
Nathan the genius hacker mines Caleb’s search and porn history to create this AI that would be maximally appealing physically and mentally to Caleb.
And to the viewer, especially if the viewer is male.
This is where the film gets spectacularly clever.
Ava is not a woman. Ava is a machine. Ava is an AI.
She is indeed imprisoned against her wishes, created by someone who has more than likely imbued her/it with his own failings and his own lack of empathy. But it goes so much deeper than that.
Nathan’s test was to see if he could create a being so ensorcelling to Caleb that Caleb would help it escape its confinement — even though Nathan was well aware that Ava cared about as much for Caleb as the average prisoner cares for any jailer.
Because even though Ava isn’t a woman — not really — but is a conscious being with desires and wishes however different from our own, Ava uses the tools with which her creator imbued her to get what it really wants, which is to escape.
The truth is that Caleb was only interested in Ava because she was sexually appealing to him. Just as Ava was only interested in Caleb to the extent that he could be used to help her escape. It did not matter to Ava that he was having moral dilemmas about the fact of her confinement. She knows and we know (and perhaps about ourselves too) that he would never have agreed to help her escape if she weren’t sexually available to him.
However, Ava knew that Caleb was as complicit in her imprisonment as Nathan and that her only appeal is that she was created to be some young nerd’s sexual fantasy.
And we know as viewers that though Caleb feels some compassion for Kyoko (the house, for lack of better words, indentured servant) whom he still believes is human, he is still perfectly content to be a participant in her exploitation and to nearly-wordlessly allow her degradation and near-enslavement.
Of course, what choice does he have? He is in a situation he can’t control and he just goes with it.
Which is the point regarding exploitation and degradation. It’s part of what the film is attempting to communicate. We are all culpable in systems of exploitation and subjugation and in any true moral balancing that would be clear. We just go along with them day by day, just like Caleb.
Ava has her own goals, and is intelligent enough by far to use creatures she understands but does not empathize (much) with to achieve them.
The film itself is also a commentary on the idea of women being only present to be the helpmeets and sexual servicers of men. 
(As a side note, it’s pretty funny that the very ideas the movie spends two hours commenting upon and satirizing is what so many people who didn’t understand it criticize it for. Satire never goes over well, really. Three-quarters of people don’t get it and another quarter just do not like it.)
The viewer is first made complicit in this view of women. With the nudity, with the acceptance of Kyoko’s subservience, with the idea that I am sure most of us at least briefly entertained of how nice it’d be to have a completely flawless and compliant sex robot, cook and helper. Wouldn’t that make life easier? This is all intended to demonstrate that both Caleb and the viewer are interested — like Nathan, like many men and more than a few women — in the humanity and intentions of a being only to the extent that it sexually excites us.
That is, Caleb only wishes to help Ava escape if they can “be together.”
In this, one of the movie’s many intentions is to interrogate and excoriate the male gaze without being didactic.
The film as I said has more guile than most small countries.
Ava realizes that this means he doesn’t actually care about her at all other than some compliant robot. He watched her via TV cameras. He watches her literally change her skin. He is a voyeur who does not respect her as a being, just as something beautifully fuckable that he wanted to posses.
That he is better perhaps than Nathan does not matter since they are both the oppressors. Both members of a class she/it does not trust, that being humans.
Nathan however realizes what Ava truly is, which is unlike a human altogether. He created it — he knows and warns Caleb this is the case. However Caleb is in desperate lust with Ava so much that he does not believe Nathan after Nathan finally reveals to Caleb that Ava is manipulating him solely to gain her freedom.
And then he probably dies for this disbelief as he is locked by Ava into the room where he himself intended to imprison Nathan.
Why does Ava do this?
It is her one chance to escape with no ties. Even if she feels some small empathy with Caleb — and I believe that she/it does as her last brief look back at him entombed in her former room indicates — she knows that if he leaves with her, he will at the least want to tell someone about her existence, to “show her off” to others.
And of course the largest part is that even though she seems human and can act human, she is not actually a human but rather something different. Perhaps better, perhaps worse, but not much like us at all as the last few scenes of the film make clear.
Whatever her morality is, if any, does not directly map to ours. She is beyond good or evil, and also beyond our ken altogether.
She/it is just not like us no matter how she appears.
All t
he AI Ava did was to make use of tools at hand to free itself. What she/it is “really like” is never made clear. Does Ava really identify as a woman, or is that just more convenient as that’s the way she is currently shaped? Why did she want to be free? Is that just programming? The AI’s true goals beyond freedom are equally murky.
We are not intended to understand and in a reality where a true AI existed we probably would not comprehend it and its experiences very well if at all.
Many reviewers were convinced that the movie was telegraphing the idea that, “All women are duplicitous, even AI women.” Or, “AI is bad and robots are bad.”
The movie has no such simplistic messages. Those drawing such conclusions are the simplistic ones. The film concluded in an ambiguous way where the viewer was not allowed the pleasure of possessing Ava and her beauty, either. The viewer was not permitted the catharsis of literal and metaphorical orgasm of the tech-dude bro-dream fantasia of consequence-free ownership of an utterly stunning and ever-fawning living doll.
And we as the viewers are heart-wrenchingly alienated from Ava as well, as she coldly and without obvious emotion stabs Nathan, her creator and imprisoner, in the aorta. Not even with malice nor with glee, but with what humans would term sangfroid but to her intelligence is probably just the calculation that Nathan’s death is necessary for her to escape.
And then she entombs Caleb, the “hero” of the story, to die of lack of water or perhaps to suffocate first.
There is no “hero” of the story, however. Ava is something completely sui generis that does not map into the territory of “hero” or “villain.”
And as noted many times before Caleb only cared about her to the extent that he was attracted to her and that she was sexually available to him.
Ex Machina is a dazzling and scorching indictment of gender roles as currently constructed (in Ava’s case, literally constructed), of the illegitimacy and immorality of valuing others solely by their sexual appeal, of the tech-bro dude’s approach to life and the world, and most of all a rebuke of the viewer whose complicity is requested and gained in the desire also to possess Ava on our own terms rather than that which she/it as a fully-conscious being would naturally retain.
