Ex Machina: Put It Back

To be short, this was a pretty bad movie.  The Mad Scientist in his castle shocking The Monster into life has been replaced by a dot-com billionaire (DCB) in his mountain-jungle hideaway.  The DCB has a reality distortion field that Steve Jobs would envy, but no one around to use it on.  Enter... the innocent young employee, ostensibly to apply the Turing Test along with various other comp-sci buzzphrases to the DCB's creation.

Let's pause for a moment and ask: Why does advanced AI have to be embodied in a largely life-like android body?  After all, one or the other problem is difficult enough.  (Just ask DARPA.)  If the DCB wants to whip up a batch of hard AI and is evidently having trouble completing that part of the task, why complicate matters with a a robot body?  "Because movie nonsense" is all I can come up with here.  It's yet another riddle wrapped around a cliche encircling a particle of nothingness presented by this movie.

Back to the plot and all that, it's just a two century old gothic horror story remade in a "high-tech as Hollywood imagines it" shell.  There are no tech wonders here, only movie makers' imagination of what those wonders might be.  It's trite decades-old stuff.  I could go on, but it's pointless and flickfilosopher had already sliced and diced this one for us.

Bottom line: 1 out of 4 stars.  The acting was passible, the effects were up to par, and the sets were beautiful.  Outside of those basics this thing is worthless.  How the hell did it get a 92% positive score over at Rotten Tomatoes?  Critics these days have mush for brains.