Civil War

Road To Washington -
No Crosby, No Hope

Civil War
Directed by Alex Garland
USA/UK 2024
A24
UK Theatrical Cut

Civil War is the latest movie both written and directed by Alex Garland. I actually find him a bit hit and miss in both professions, truth be told. The ones that fall into both those categories which were more hits with me were the TV show Devs (reviewed by me here) and, to an extent, his movie Men (reviewed here). This new movie, set in the very near future, is about an ongoing civil war in the USA, where the states of California and Texas team up against everyone else in an attempt to take over the country.

This story follows a seasoned ace photo-journalist called Lee (played by Kirsten Dunst) and her journalistic partner Joel (played by Wagner Moura) as they go on a 400 plus mile road trip across a war torn USA towards Washington, to try and get one last interview with the President (played fleetingly by Nick Offerman) before the combined forces of the two opposing states steamroller through and kill him (with no intent of taking any prisoners). Aiding and abetting them... or rather just tagging along for the ride but becoming seriously involved in the action... are seasoned journalist Sammy (played by Stephen McKinley Henderson) and ‘shutterbug trying to get experience in war photojournalism’ Jessie (played Cailee Spaeny).

The film is absolutely exquisite and I’ll go ahead now and say that this is easily Alex Garland’s best work ever. It’s a sometimes reflective, often chaotic and definitely violent, intense and suspenseful road movie that doesn’t itself stop to take any prisoners along the way. Now, a lot of critics have taken the tack that the film, seen through the lens of the ladies and gentlemen of the press, doesn’t make any judgement calls or take political sides (I believe Garland chose those two unlikely allied states to detract from drawing a political message)... except for one of my favourite reviewers, who said the film is indeed political. Well, I don’t know who is right about that because, as long time readers will know by now, I don’t have a political bone in my body and so probably wouldn’t recognise any points being made. That said, I certainly didn’t think the movie was trying to pontificate for any one political alignment and the take away messages I took home from it don’t, I suspect, fall into any such camp.

I took away two things. Firstly, the message I always take from any film... people shouldn’t make war or go around killing each other. Behaving like that is just crazy outside the confines of mass cultural art and entertainment. 

 But the key thing the film seems to play around with for me... and it’s another old cliché of a point but it sits right with me, is this. What kind of human being are you if you stop to take pictures of the violence and injustice going on around you and don’t put the camera down and try to help out instead? The question is none too subtly explored in this film and Kirsten Dunst’s character, who seems to be secretly haunted by this herself, certainly addresses the issue head-on in a conversation she has with Jessie at one point. Her answer is that you’re there to document and let other people make the judgements and Lee and Jessie certainly come to a conclusion with their individual grasp of that context at the end of the movie. To say anything more about that matter would be to spoil the ending but, to that end, there are also certainly characters in the movie who, in the parlance of Star Trek, are definitely ‘red shirts’.

And the film is shot really well, edited really well and has brilliant sound design. I mean, sure, all the sound cliches are in there such as using upbeat or trivial songs juxtaposed to the horrors of a situation to highlight them... or the old chestnut of letting the music take over to the point where that’s all there is on the soundtrack, before it suddenly drops out and the artillery and explosions of the situation rush in to give a shot in the arm to the audience. But, clichés become that because they work really well and Garland and his colleagues use them to great advantage here.

Lastly, I have to say a word about the acting performances in this. Everybody is absolutely great but special shout outs go to both Cailee Spaeny (who you are in fear for throughout the entire movie) and Kirsten Dunst (turning in what might be the greatest performance of her entire career to date, as far as I’m concerned). There’s also a short but pretty scary and intense sequence featuring Kirsten’s real life spouse Jesse Plemons, which is almost unbearable to watch... a snippet of it can be seen on the trailer.  

And that’s me done with Civil War, I think. This seems to me, from this opening end of the lifespan of the film, to be a stone cold classic which I’ll snap up on Blu Ray when the time comes and, it’s good to see this before a real civil war breaks out in either the USA or the UK anytime soon (or both, as both countries seem to be just around the corner from that, it seems to me). Definitley worth a look if you want a suspenseful time at the cinema.

Men

Born
Identity

Men
UK 2022
Directed by Alex Garland
A24

Warning: Light spoilerage.

Okay... after not being all that impressed by the writer/director Alex Garland’s cinematic output over the years, I have to say I’m very shocked to have found he’s made a movie that I actually quite like. Yay! Finally I can say nice things about one of Garland’s movies. Well, okay, I really liked DEVS too (reviewed here) but, that was a TV show so it’s a different kettle of fish altogether.

Men starts off with an image of the central protagonist Harper, played by Jessie Buckley, left with a bashed up bloody nose, staring in contemplation from her flat near the Thames. As she looks out the window, she sees a man fall to his death. Then, sometime after these events, she goes to stay for a two week holiday in a big country home in an obscure village (said to be in the wilds of Hertfordshire). As the movie progresses, we find out that the man who leapt purposefully to his death (it is assumed) was her abusive husband, who had minutes before hit her.

The husband is played by Paapa Essiedu, which is an important point because, as she starts meeting people in the village such as the landlord, the policeman, the local vicar and a strange entity based on the English Green Man (but there’s also a mythic connection to something called the Sheela na gig thrown in for good measure too)... they are all played by Rory Kinnear (who people may remember as Tanner in the modern James Bond movies and also from his stand out performance as the Frankenstein monster in the brilliant Penny Dreadful TV show). And he looks a little different as each of, arguably, many characters (or manifestations of one character, take your pick)... and sometimes quite disturbing, as when his head is CGI’d onto a pre-teen’s body in a few scenes.

And it’s one of those films where the central protagonist, in this case Harper, spends a lot of time alone contemplating nature and trying to figure out what’s going on in the village as various strange things happen to her. As we find out more about the sequence at the start of the film, we find she is trying to come to terms with the guilt she is haunted by, for yelling at her husband after his abuse, leading to him jumping off the balcony of the flat above but, as she meets various different Rory’s, some of them nice but odd, some of them not so nice and some of them downright strange, it becomes a film where the male of the species somehow seems to encourage those feelings and offer far from comforting opinions and advice about the bloody end of Harper’s marriage. In fact, each of the men she meets, even the seemingly nice one (who I can just about see might be seen as passive aggressive... or just being a gentleman, depending on what decade you grew up), are in some way an intimidating presence in her life.

And that’s as far as I’m going with the plot other than to say, the end of the movie is like if David Cronenberg had decided to remake Xtro but just kept piling on the body horror in excessive amounts. So if you are a horror person... this film definitely goes for it by the end. Depending on your interpretation of events as either real or metaphorical I guess... although it seems to me to be depicted as both.

And, it’s really nice to look at too. Garland makes good use of architectural details and natural shapes in the forest to frame his actors,favouring an emphasis on the centre of a shot and often echoing a tunnel shape which is the location of one odd scene early on in the film. Everything looks fantastic but then, I’ve never had a problem with the visuals on a Garland movie. Usually, my biggest problem with the writer/director is that he has a decent enough and intriguing set up and then kinda runs out of steam or becomes too obvious towards the end of his films. This one, however, doesn’t over explain or telegraph anything and also relies quite heavily on the viewer to bring their own interpretation with them... at least I hope that was the idea because, while I felt like I was being prodded but not quite beaten over the head by the slightly misogynistic male attitudes on display in the film, I did get the impression that we were also supposed to decode it in our own way. So, yeah, sorry if that’s not the case but that’s the impression I got from it.

And the special effects of all manner of goriness at the end is truly startling. You’ve seen some of this done before in various ways, I’m sure but I was surprisingly impressed by the imagination behind the concept of the effects on this one. The film is also full of signifiers to various things which may or may not symbolise rebirth or, in the case of a whole bunch of apples falling off a tree on cue, perhaps that should be ripening? Either way, the film leaves a lot unsaid and, in the case of this one, I think it’s better off that way. Oh... Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow provide one of their highly listenable scores for this but, alas, so far (at time of writing) there’s no glimpse of a proper CD release being on the cards anytime soon.

So, yeah, a short review of Men but I did enjoy this one and it turns out it’s a very nice slice of intrigue in the folk horror vein... linked to a kind of meditation on guilt but, again, whether it’s a metaphor for redemption or abuse is a question for each member of the audience, I suspect. This one’s worth a watch though, for sure.

DEVS

Ultra Violet

DEVS
2020 UK/USA
BBC/BBC iPlayer, FX

Warning: Very minor spoilers about the plot set up from episode one.

So if you’ve been reading my reviews for a while now you’ll know that I’ve never been that keen on Alex Garland's work but, here I am in the middle of Covid 19 lockdown and the trailer I saw for this eight episode miniseries called DEVS looked pretty intriguing so I figured I’d at least give the first episode a go. Well good for him, he actually managed to keep me watching the whole eight episodes and I kinda enjoyed thinking my way through what is, on the surface at least, the illusion of a fairly dense text. As it is, you will figure out almost everything fairly quickly and the simplicity of the idea is something that every young toddler thinks of at some point in their early life, I suspect, but the presentation of this, while it has its ‘ever so slight’ faults, chalks this up as being much better than his previous (although equally obvious) credited movie works either as writer or director... namely Ex Machina (which I reviewed here) and Annihilation (which I reviewed here).

The plot, as much as I can reveal without totally spoiling that central premise you are working your way towards in the first episode (it’s pretty much spelled out very clearly after that) involves a central protagonist called Lily, played by my favourite dancing robot lady from Ex Machina (and she was also in Annihilation), actress Sonoya Mizuno. The story starts off as a mystery when, at the end of the first episode, Lily’s boyfriend Sergei (played by Karl Glusman from Love, reviewed here), who has just been promoted to the DEVS section at their dream job IT company workplace known as AMAYA, is killed by the chief of security for an act of industrial espionage. This is presented to the world as a suicide but Lily, obviously, knows better and so she finds her computer genius ex-boyfriend (played by Jin Ha) to investigate further. This brings down the wrath of the security head plus an almost but not quite convoluted espionage story into the mix when, really, the story details don’t matter because it’s just a mystery to lure you into thinking about the real thing... what happens at DEVS.

And that’s where it falls down a little because, nice as the presentation of the central problem is... and it is really nice to look at with an extraordinary soundtrack comprised of some needle drops plus original score by regular musical collaborators Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury... you’ve already kind of figured out what you need to know by the end of the first episode and, if you haven’t guessed it already by then, you’ll certainly have it in the bag by the last episode. This is unfortunate because, yeah, you will be able to predict where the ending is going to take you and, despite talks of the nature of the work being ‘monitored’ at DEVS, it does seem to be a somewhat less than satisfactory conclusion to the whole thing. A kind of hollow victory for Lily, the boss of DEVS (Forest, outstandingly played by Nick Offerman) and his girlfriend (played by Alison Pill) which is only, to be honest, held together by the truly wonderful performances of these three.

Okay, my main problem with DEVS is also a problem with my overall perception of it because, I’m going to say it out straight and say that it does feel kind of padded in places and this storyline could have been much punchier and dramatic as a movie, rather than stretched out over eight long episodes. However, the contradiction for me is in the fact that, if it had been presented as a much shorter movie, the obviousness of the central premise and ending would have been a real turn off for me and I would probably have slated it. As it happens though, I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would and that’s because of all the visual distraction overlaying that starting point, I think.

That being said, the very slight ‘twist’ on a cosmetic level of the title of the show and the name of the work section, DEVS, is not something I saw coming. I’m not really that impressed with it but it is quite clever... I just wish it meant more than what it does in the grand scheme of things in the show. I’m trying to keep this as spoiler free as I can so I won’t reveal it here but, if you’re wondering why my review title isn’t the standard pun yet has nothing to do with the content of the series, that’s because it’s a decoder key for the title of the show. Crack that and you will crack what is, honestly, a very minor spoiler.

There is one thing I would really complain about, though... and that’s the use of needle drop music at the start of one of the episodes. The piece is Steve Reich’s Come Out from 1966 and it’s a nice piece where the recorded phrase ‘come out to show them’ (I won’t get into the political implications of the recording here) is synched against a copy of it and each looped on two tape recorders at very slightly different speeds. As just over twelve minutes elapse, the two go more and more gradually out of phase and the way the human brain perceives them, often as a wooshing sound like a train on tracks, is constantly shifting as the fluid relationship between the two copies of the same recording continues. So basically it’s a track about what man calls ‘time’ and your perception of it through sound. Which is why I didn’t appreciate Garland’s use of it in the episode where the whole thing is chopped up and spliced together into about a minute or two... that’s not the point of the music at all although, I appreciate Garland was also maybe making a comment about the way analogue recording devices can be hijacked and re-used for a different purpose in the digital world.

But... yeah, nothing much more I want to say about DEVS, I think. A nice production with some nice direction from Garland (better perhaps than the writing although he certainly has an ear for dialogue), nice music, some outstanding performances and a certain sense of intrigue which, although it kinda falls flat at the end, keeps you mostly entertained as you go through the episodes. Also, if you’re a fan of Garland’s other stuff, then this sits right alongside it thematically and is probably right up your street. So give this one a whirl, for sure.

Annihilation

Arming Shimmer Man

Annihilation
UK/USA 2018
Directed by Alex Garland
Paramount Pictures

Warning: Very minor spoilers, I guess.

Annihilation is Alex Garland’s adaptation of the first novel in Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy.

Now, I tend to find Alex Garland one of those writers/directors who are a bit frustrating. I loved Dredd (reviewed here - it was recently made known on the internet that he was responsible for ghost-directing it) but I had real problems with Ex Machina (reviewed here) and I think it stems from the same issue. Something I believe he shares with Doctor Who writer Stephen Moffat. He tends to have great set ups which arouse the curiosity but the endings and most of the various revelations along the way tend to be more than just a little bit obvious and, alas, although it’s based on someone else’s source material, I think that this is very much the case here with Annihilation.

So we have the spectacular but, to be honest, extremely clichéd sci-fi concept inspired/borrowed from... and the writer himself denies this but it seems quite obvious to me... Boris Strugatsky and Arkady Strugatsky’s excellent science fiction novel Roadside Picnic, which was also made into a blisteringly cool science fiction movie called Stalker by one of my favourite directors, Andrei Tarkovsky. This is the concept of an area on Earth which has been rendered or declared off limits due to some kind of mysterious alien infestation. Films such as Monsters (reviewed here) have been using this as the starting blocks for their own tales for years and Annihilation does the same thing, I think, by taking this as an opening set up.

The film starts off with Natalie Portman’s ex-military biology specialist Lena returning from a mission into the forbidden zone of the tale, a place which is named The Shimmer. This scene, where she is interrogated by Benedict Wong (in some kind of bio protection suit) is the framing scene which we keep going back to while the tale unfolds... as the returning Lena tells her story of the days (while months pass outside) she has spent in The Shimmer.

We then cut to a flashback scene from before the main narrative (the main narrative is the flashback technically but it’s where we keep coming back to) of her husband, played by Oscar Isaac, filmed by him at the same time he was shooting scenes for Star Wars - The Last Jedi on the set very near to where this was shot. He has unexpectedly returned home, missing presumed dead, from his top secret military mission after being absent for a year. But something doesn’t seem right and when he starts to slowly, internally combust, the ambulance that Lena and he are riding in to get him to a hospital is intercepted by the military and she wakes up in 'Area X', where the slowly expanding Shimmer can be viewed from a, relatively, safe distance.

At this point, you probably have already figured out what the main end twist/scene of the movie is going to be but I won’t elaborate on it here since some people will enjoy the journey of getting there and might be put off if they realise the answer to things are that easy.

Anyway, after hearing that every other mission from The Shimmer has never returned and only her husband has come back from the last one, Lena realises the only way to help him is to go into whatever is in The Shimmer so she can figure out something to keep her husband alive. So she goes in with the tough cookie team leader of the project, played by Jennifer Jason-Leigh, plus three other military women played by Tessa Thompson, Gina Rodriguez and Tuva Novotny. And the film follows the journey of these five women as they try to trek to the lighthouse where The Shimmer was first started.

On the way, of course, new perils await them and their slowly diminishing group try to survive both the strange things they see in The Shimmer comprising biological mutations and, also, each other... as paranoia and madness begin to creep in.

Well the five ladies are all great with their performances in this and the storyline is refreshingly surreal, in some ways. It doesn’t hurt that the cinematography and set design are never short of being, at the very least, visually interesting. I just wish this film could have got a cinema release in this country as opposed to me having to watch it on a television set, where I have to say the potential power of the movie seemed somewhat diminished.

For example, Garland seems to like using vertical lines to section off areas of the widescreen aspect ratio and use them to frame characters and objects... as a lot of the more interesting directors do, I've noticed in recent years (as global DVD and Blu Ray sales has made more international stuff in the correct aspect ratio readily available). I don’t know if this is a specific fingerprint of his visual signature or not but I did notice he had a particular leaning to crowd out or overfill one delineated section and leave the other remaining sections with hardly anything in them for quite a bit of the time. Which makes for an interesting watch as you try to figure out what part of the screen he was going to fill up next.

There is also a nice sequence with a genetically altered bear which is quite memorable. The girls have already suffered two attacks by a strange crocodile and fast moving bear in the course of the movie (and one of them certainly doesn’t survive one of these attacks). These were, it has to be said, less than surprising moments and very clumsily telegraphed by the director. However, in a sequence which is a little reminiscent of a scene in John Carpenter’s The Thing, where the most paranoid of the group has the others tied to chairs and is being particularly threatening to Natalie Portman’s character, another of the girls can be heard calling from off screen and... well I won’t give away what happens next but the juxtaposition of creature and sound emitting from its hungry maw is more than a little surreal and extremely attention grabbing. It could have gone completely the other way and been a really laugh-worthy moment but somehow the director manages to reign it all in and it’s ultimately a very effective scene.

The film is also helped by a score from Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, which sounds a bit like they are electronically trying to echo elements of György Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna or Requiem For Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, Two Mixed Choirs and Orchestra... which is fine by me because those are two of my favourite pieces of music by one of my favourite composers. I just wish someone would release a proper CD of this score instead of expecting people to download it as... I’d really like to hear it away from the movie.

Ultimately, the end of the movie after Lena reaches the lighthouse and discovers its secrets are... not much of a discovery by this point in the game if you have been paying attention and the set up for the final twist is, frankly, very obvious. You kind of hope they are going to veer into different territory but it stands as it is. We all, in the house I was watching this in, saw this ending more or less from the start and so, yeah, we all felt a little deflated by the end of it, to be honest.

That being said, Annihilation is not a bad movie and I’d certainly place it higher than Ex Machina in this director’s work. I might even go on to read the novels at some point too because, hopefully, there’s more to the story than just this exercise in the obvious. Maybe the good stuff coming from what is essentially an intriguing concept turns up later in the novels? Certainly, if you liked this wrier/director’s other work then you will probably get something out of this one. Not a terrible movie and quite entertaining but it's not going to be making any of my end of year lists, I suspect.

Ex Machina

Blues Ex Machina

Ex Machina
2014 USA/UK
Directed by Alex Garland 
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some light spoilers on this one, I guess. 

Right. Been worrying about how to approach this review because, frankly, I know that one of my twitter followers really liked this movie and I suspect she’d be very disappointed with my response to it if she ever read this. However, I’ve always kept the reviews on the blog honest as to my reactions to the films and it would be irresponsible to my readers to be anything less than that now... so should Becky Grace Lea of the nethersphere known as Twitter ever stumble on this review... and I sincerely hope she doesn’t... turn back now and don’t read this one would be my best advice to her.

Also, anyone who reads on from here and hates this review should probably go and check out Becky’s review of this which, I’m sure, will probably be up at some time within the next day or two of this review going live and which can almost certainly be found somewhere on the Assorted Buffery website here. She’ll have a much more positive spin on it for you, I’m sure. As for me... well you were all warned.

Okay, so Ex Machina is the first film to be directed by the famous novelist Alex Garland and, I have to say, it kinda feels like it’s a first film and somebody trying to get something out of their system, in some respects. I can’t say I was particularly looking forward to this one since, after seeing the trailer, I was pretty sure I knew exactly where it was going to be going with the ending of the movie. Well, the good news is... the film doesn’t quite go exactly where you assume it will be going from the set up in the trailer. Another piece of good news is that the implications of Deus Ex Machina being used as a literary device to give the film a cop out, miracle ending is not the usage the title of the film is embracing. It’s merely a metaphorical identifier of the origins of the phrase and not the modern, more common usage of the term.

And those are the two bits of really good news I have about the film. Now for the mostly bad stuff...

The ending of the movie and attempted sleight of hand used as a general progression towards that idea doesn’t really work because we are already expecting something almost clever to happen and, when it just starts telegraphing the ending of the movie to us within, literally, the first ten minutes of the opening sequence, we are pretty much there at the end already, and you have the rest of the running time to start wondering when one of the other characters will stop being an idiot and see what’s really going on. Once the power cuts start, and we really know they’re not power cuts right from the very first one, then the audience will sense straight away the degree of manipulation at work within the main narrative strand and it doesn’t take much of a push to realise where this will all be leading to. Indeed, by the time one of the lead characters cuts his arm open to reveal certain information to the audience, it’s already too late... we’ve started ditching those preconceptions based on the trailer already within the first ten minutes... so that surprise at the evidence of actual humanity within the film is somewhat stingless and antiseptic by that point.

But, you know what? There’s good stuff in this movie too. It’s just always tempered with the bad stuff.

Some of the acting, for instance, is very good... although the dialogue does seem to be a bit streamlined and non naturalistic at times. Are the sometimes less convincing moments, then, the fault of the actors or the writing of the lines? I’m not sure. Hard to call. It maybe explains why the one character in this film without any lines coming out of her mouth was, for me at least, the most interesting and watchable presence in the film. That is to say, while I found the main robot creation played by Alicia Vikander to be interesting and, due to her android nature, kind of spot on... it was the character played by another actress I’d not heard of before, Kyoko played by Sonoya Mizuno, who grabbed all my attention in this. As an actress and presence on the screen, she was absolutely stunning in this and the one reason why I didn’t feel like I’d wasted my Saturday evening at the cinema. I’d definitely like to see more films with her in and, possibly because she didn’t have some very basic and clunky dialogue coming out of her lips, I found her to be the best thing about Ex Machina.

The story itself seems to be guilty of the thing I’ve been accusing most US made science fiction films of doing in the last ten years or so... playing catch up with the 1950s. These are exactly the same kinds of stories that people like Philip K. Dick were writing as shorts in the 50s and 60s and for someone to be claiming this is an original idea, or even that it’s executed as well or with at least an element of surprise being retained, is something I find to be really poor behaviour. But, like I said, there’s good with the bad.

Alex Garland can direct quite well.

That’s an established fact, now. The opening montage is, perhaps, a little aggresively edited and some of the shots are maybe not as creative as they could be given the artificial nature of sets which can be controlled to the nth degree. Nothing hugely, visually creative springs to mind when I think back on the film now. However, when edited together, the footage cuts together in a way that was neither confusing or in any way inhibiting you seeing what the director wants you to see... well, apart from accidentally telegraphing the ending, that is. What that means is that, while this does indeed feel like a first film... it’s one where the director has proven his confidence and, frankly, means that people should maybe give him a load more money so he can grow and become the directorial artist that’s obviously lurking within the best selling novelist. I think this guy has proven, with the clean look and feel of this one, that he definitely has the potential.

As a film which is entertaining... it had its moments but most of those, as I’ve indicated already, featured Sonoya Mizuno’s turn as Kyoko. A role not bound by any lines the actress might have been required to speak. In fact, I would say that both Kyoko and Vikander’s Ava were the most watchable aspects of this movie. The two main male protagonists, played by Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac, both bring a lot of enthusiasm but it seemed, to me, that they were much more hampered by the script. Real people don’t talk like this and, if you’re someone with the genius of a director like, say, Hal Hartley, then the warmth and emotional intent will always come through the stylistic stripping down of the sometimes clinical dialogue but, with this film, the performances seem to add up to being less than the sum of their combined parts, it seemed to me.

The ending, also, or should I say the epilogue to the film, seemed like something we don’t need. The final fate of Domhnall Gleeson’s character was already fairly eloquently sealed at one point and the last series of shots of both him and Ava, after their last scene together, were completely unnecessary. The points about whether Ava has managed to pass a specific kind of test had all been made, perhaps a lot sooner than the director intended, and the final scenes shown are not giving us any new information... I think that stuff could have been pared back right down and, perhaps, if the director had even lead us to the point where he’d cut to the credits before the last scene between Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson took place, maybe with the final moments having Ava looking over Gleeson's unconscious body, Garland would at least have given us a film with a little more enticing ambiguity at the conclusion as opposed to what we have here. That being said, the totally superfluous last 6 or so minutes might well have been a studio addition as opposed to Garland’s own natural conclusion to the narrative and so it might not be his fault. As it is, the ending is overcooked and it’s a shame because giving us a lot less of a conclusion would have at least encouraged the audience to think around some of the key issues more than they will now, I expect.

The only other possible saving grace to this film might well have been the score by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury but, while I found it effective in some parts of the movie, I found it to be more wallpapery in other parts and I wonder if that’s the fault of the way the score has been mixed into the foley or if it’s within the composition. I’m not sure how it will play as a stand alone listen on a CD but I think it was a bit of a hit and miss affair in the body of the movie itself. Not sure if I’m going to give it a try away from the movie or not, truth be told. I’ll have to see how much the album is if it ever gets a proper, non-downloadable, physical release.

The film itself, though, seemed a bit less special than a lot of the buzz going around on twitter had lead me to believe. It seems popular, which is good news for Garland and hopefully he’ll get another go to grow as a director. As for me and judging it still in terms of someone who had seen the trailer for the movie first, I’d have to say that Ex Machina certainly wasn’t a terrible movie but, neither was it a particularly good one. That is to say, it’s not nearly as bad as the movie I was expecting it to be... but not nearly as good as the movie I was hoping it would be. It’s not a film which many will find all that challenging, I expect, but some will possibly like the “popcorn” fodder aspect to it and the CGI is done quite well for special effects enthusiasts. I think future generations will probably respond to it better because of the lack of historical journey to the concept when they’re youngsters, perhaps. I just hope there won’t be a Deus Ex Machina Part Deux.