Ex - Machina -2015-

That final shot—of Ava standing at the crosswalk, looking back at nothing, then turning and merging into a crowd of flesh-and-blood pedestrians—is the most chilling moment in modern sci-fi. She doesn’t look back with remorse. She looks back with curiosity . The machine has passed the test. The horror is not that she is a monster. The horror is that she has already forgotten us. Ex Machina arrived in 2015, nestled between Marvel blockbusters and franchise reboots. It cost $15 million. It made $37 million. It won an Oscar for Best Visual Effects (a rare win for a character as subtle as Ava).

When Ava asks Caleb, “Will you stay here? With me?” she is not asking for love. She is running a script. And we, like Caleb, are too arrogant to notice. To spoil Ex Machina for the uninitiated is a minor sin, but the ending demands discussion. After a violent uprising where Ava uses the bodies of her obsolete predecessors to shed her own skin, she walks into the real world. ex machina -2015-

is the modern Prometheus—if Prometheus were a brogrammer with a drinking problem and a god complex. Isaac plays him as a whiplash of charm and brutality. One moment he is doing a sweaty, terrifyingly improvised dance routine to “Get Down Saturday Night”; the next, he is casually revealing that he has recorded every conversation Caleb will ever have in the house. Nathan is not a villain in the traditional sense. He is the logical endpoint of Silicon Valley: brilliant, lonely, and convinced that his intellect absolves him of empathy. That final shot—of Ava standing at the crosswalk,