Ex Machina is a 2014 thriller directed by Alex Garland and starring Alicia Vikander, Oscar Issac, and Domhnall Gleeson. It is a visually stunning movie that will also make you think. The basic premise is that a coder for an internet search engine (played by Domhnall Gleeson) wins a competition to hang out for a week with the reclusive CEO of the company (played by Oscar Isaac). In reality, he is there to test an artificially intelligent robot named Ava (played by Alicia Vikander).
The 4k set is a two-disc set containing a UHD disc and a regular Blu-Ray disc. The movie looks and sounds wonderful in the UHD format, and the cinematography and location shots from Norway really pop in 4k. That is especially true if you are watching on a large screen. The UHD disc has just the movie itself. All the other extras are on the regular blu-ray disc. Those include a 40-minute making-of featurette, a panel discussion from the 2015 SXSW festival, and then 8 shorter behind-the-scenes vignettes. A very good amount of material for a movie that clocks in just under two hours.
Overall, the movie is well-written and very well-acted. It does have a lower-budget independent movie feel to it despite there being a lot of CGI. It does have a bit of nudity (mainly toward the end of the movie) but it is not really gratuitous, as well as some violence, again toward the end of the movie. I would say it does earn the R rating, but it is not as hard an R rating as some other movies have, where there is a ton of sex and violence just to have sex and violence. There are a lot of themes throughout the movie, including the role of computers and technology in our lives, whether computers could ever become sentient, and, if so, how humans would treat them. And, of course, if they do, how they would treat humans. It has a pretty nice twist ending that I will not give away, but it is not necessarily one that you would expect. It is a great movie that is definitely worth the time to watch.
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