It was a good day for me overall. Somehow I found myself watching a private special screening of Ex Machina movie with the writer and director Alex Garland present at the theatre. It was my first time ever and an amazing experience to hear the thought of the director about film making and his opinion on the actors and Artificial Intelligence. Speaking of Artificial Intelligence, the movie itself was fun to watch and a tid-bit thought provoking. There were just four actors (3 major ones) in the movie interacting amongst themselves and all of them were amazing. Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, a coder who "wins" a contest and gets invited to the CEO Nathan's (played by Oscar Isaac) private home far away in wilderness. Oscar Isaac plays a genius with questionable morals, who has built this AI sentinel Ava, played so wonderfully by Alicia Vikander, and wants Caleb to test this AI by performing a Turing test on it. What he fails to understand for most part is that he himself was part of the test all along. The AI has grown itself and learnt so much that she understands the imprisonment she has been kept under by Nathan and secretly plans to escape by using Caleb. In a way, the movie for me is just another human story but told with a twist that its actually a "sentinel" who becomes a human by learning. The actors in this movie were amazing and so was Alex's directorial debut. I have seen some of his previous films where he was the writer i.e Sunshine and Dredd and both were very different and fun to watch. One negative for me though was the ending (SPOILERS AHEAD) when she leaves Caleb (who she herself learns to be "good") and goes alone to explore the outside world. In my mind, it was a bit of contradiction but that is perhaps what being human is all about.
Overall Review: Amazing and must watch if you love indie films and are into science.