>>13559I fucking hate Ex Machina so fucking much. It's a "philosophical" movie in the same way that a big budget Oppenheimer biopic is "scientific" – it isn't, it's just entertainment.
Nathan is so obviously the filmmakers' idea of some evil, hyper-masculine, darkly manipulative tech-bro emblematic of the industry… except that the tech industry is dominated by people like Caleb: effete nerds who believe in insane fantasies like "superintelligence" while self-righteously LARPing as heroes and liberators. Nathan is far more pragmatic and humble by comparison.
The ideological core of this sad excuse of a film, and of the tech industry, is the cynical belief that human beings are ultimately nothing more than inefficient pattern-matching machines. Nathan understands the difference between the purpose of a machine and the agency of a human being. His only mistake was being blind to the sad fact that there are disgusting degenerate subhuman scum like Caleb who will irrationally outsource their agency (to a fucking machine, no less).
Maybe these retarded filmmakers should turn the lens inward, for once, with their pathetic attempt at critique. The entertainment industry is more often than not guilty of the very things it criticizes, and has grown increasingly incapable of producing a film with any level of intellectual sophistication whatsoever. The greatest irony of Ex Machina is that what most defines it is its superficial performance of intellectualism. Just like Ava, the only thing it does truly well is tricking the viewer that it's intelligent, when it was really just scripted.