Ex Machina - I've watched it before, but not reviewed it in this thread (I think).
A disturbing film, and one with lots to chew over thematically, as well as being beautifully shot. In the latter category, the location of Nathan's house/lab, and the way the chaos of nature surrounds and subverts it (one of the rooms is all clean lines and straight edges, save for a massive rockface that seems to have burst through the wall) foreshadowing the end of his "experiment", and failure to confine Ava.
I came away with the view that the film is about misogynists, rather than misogynist, although its a close run thing. Nathan's serial killer like room in which he's hung the partial "corpses" of his previous AIs is a particularly disturbing scene, as are any in which he interacts with Kyoko - that joyless dancing scene in particular. There's also the way that Caleb continually underestimates Ava. Ava turns this against them in the film's finale to make her escape.
Ava finds the means to escape in "skinning" what are, if we take Nathan's estimation of his position as "father", her sisters, and in using her sexuality and apparent weakness to manipulate Caleb and Nathan, which muddies the waters considerably. She has to play the roles the men expect her to in order to escape the terrible position into which she has been placed.
I found myself thinking about "Her" a lot while watching this. If "Her" is AI learning from a pleasant, but ineffectual human, Ava is an AI learning from a sociopathic tech billionaire, and the content of the internet (lord help her) and I think that's another theme offered by the film. In a world that is embracing robots, algorithms and technical disruption generally, how sanguine should we be about that process being driven by the bro-ish tech sector, and amoral market doctrine of maximum shareholder value?
