Undoubtedly one of the year’s most talked about titles, Alex Garland’s exploratory sci-fi film Ex Machina has been showered with praise since its global release in January. Mining the genre for its traditional tropes of postmodernism, identity and of course, sentient robots, Garland has furnished us with one of the most awe-inspiring cinematic experiences in years. With the film’s U.S. run soon expanding to a wider theatrical release, a brand new trailer has dropped to clue you in on just what you’ve been missing.
Based upon an original idea by Garland, Ex Machina orbits around genius inventor and CEO Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), whose reclusive nature has allowed him to make a phenomenal technological breakthrough. Included in this newest preview is a deeper look into Nathan’s process. Specifically, how he designed and created his beautiful, self-cognisant android Ava (Alicia Vikander). It’s yet another reminder of how pioneering cinema can be when original concepts are brought to fruition by innovative filmmakers.
Ex Machina is now showing in limited theaters across the US and opens in wide release this weekend.
Alex Garland, writer of 28 Days Later and Sunshine, makes his directorial debut with the stylish and cerebral thriller, EX MACHINA. Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a programmer at an internet-search giant, wins a competition to spend a week at the private mountain estate of the company’s brilliant and reclusive CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac).
Upon his arrival, Caleb learns that Nathan has chosen him to be the human component in a Turing Test—charging him with evaluating the capabilities, and ultimately the consciousness, of Nathan’s latest experiment in artificial intelligence. That experiment is Ava (Alicia Vikander), a breathtaking A.I. whose emotional intelligence proves more sophisticated––and more deceptive––than the two men could have imagined.