Alan Turing’s story is, of course, explored in **The Imitation Game **(landing on November 14) but the British maths genius’ legacy also fuels Alex Garland’s Ex_Machina. The Turing Test — a quiz devised by Turing to test whether humans can tell whether they’re talking to a machine or another person – is at the heart of Garland’s sci-fi, which has a new trailer and two posters to share with you. The former has a disruptive, schizoid soundscape like no other...
The machine in question is Alicia Vikander's artificial intelligence, Ava, pride and joy of an enigmatic tech CEO Nathan (played by Oscar Isaac). Domhnall Gleeson’s Caleb, a coder for Nathan’s Google-like search giant Bluebook, wins the opportunity to spend a week with the two of them, a kind of human guinea pig for his boss’s experiment at his Alaskan mountain retreat.
“It’s an old-fashioned science-fiction,” Garland explains in Empire's new on-set report. “You’ve got two guys, a female robot and another woman, and it’s what happens to those four people over the course of trying to establish whether this machine is conscious or not. And the examination of the machine’s consciousness leads to an examination of their own. Hence it gets trippy and psychedelic.”
“Trippy and psychedelic” sounds good to us. The fourth corner of this eerie rectangle remains largely under wraps, even in the trailer.
Ex_Machina makes it UK bow on January 23. US readers will be seeing it from April 25, thanks to a newly-signed distribution deal with A24{