Like a newly launched high-end smartphone, Ex Machina looks cool and sleek, but ultimately proves flimsy and underpowered. Up until the final scenes, Garland creates and sustains a credible atmosphere of unease and scientific speculation, defined by color-coded production design and a tiny, capable cast.' Steve Dalton from The Hollywood Reporter stated, 'The story ends in a muddled rush, leaving many unanswered questions. Club criticized the way the sci-fi, near the end, veered off course from being a 'film of ideas' by 'taking an arbitrary left turn into the territory of corny slasher thrillers': 'While Ex Machina’s ending isn’t unmotivated, it does fracture much of what’s special about the movie. And while Ex Machina replaces the stitches and neck bolts with gears and fiber-optics, it all feels an awful lot like the same story.' Jaime Perales Contreras, writing for Letras Libres, compared Ex Machina as a gothic experience similar to a modern version of Frankenstein, saying 'both the novel Frankenstein and the movie Ex Machina share the history of a fallible god in a continuous battle against his creation.' Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of The A.V. Mike Scott, writing for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, said, 'It's a theme Mary Shelley brought us in Frankenstein, which was first published in 1818. Wanting total creative freedom, and without having to add conventional action sequences, Garland made the film on as small a budget as possible. Other inspirations came from films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Altered States, and books written by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ray Kurzweil and others. Besides the Turing test, the film references the 'Chinese room' thought experiment, as well as Mary's room, a thought experiment about a scientist who has studied, but never experienced, the concept of color. Shanahan, along with Adam Rutherford, became a consultant for the film, and the ISBN of his book is referred to as an easter egg in the film. The idea was written down and put aside until later. During the pre-production of Dredd, while going through a book by Murray Shanahan about consciousness and embodiment, Garland had an 'epiphany'. Trying to find an answer on his own, he started reading books on the topic. His later ideas came from years of discussions he had been having with a friend with an expertise in neuroscience, who claimed machines could never become sentient. The foundation for Ex Machina was laid when Garland was 11 or 12 years old, after he had done some basic coding and experimentation on a computer his parents had bought him and which he sometimes felt had a mind of its own.
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