Brian E
What has happened to writing? I watched maybe 45 minutes of this disaster, before feeling as though my intelligence had suffered through sufficient insult.
As I see it, one of the keys to writing believable science fiction is immersion through suspension of disbelief. If we, the viewers, are presented with characters who are supposed to be highly intelligent, then those characters must make intelligent decisions. If they consistently fail to, then it is impossible to remain immersed within the story.
Take the first scene, as one example (spoilers ahead, but do yourself a favour and consider this a PSA). A soldier, bone thin for some reason, who has suffered a traumatic battlefield injury has been implanted with a neural chip (brain implant they call it). The chip is supposed to restore brain function, at least to an extent. The brilliant scientist activates the chip and the soldier wakes from his catatonic state.
The soldier is clearly confused and in great distress, but after a few questions the lead scientist turns his back to the 'patient' and declares the technology a dead end. In doing so, he places a scalpel obviously within reach of the traumatised, confused, unstable and distressed soldier he's just resuscitated from the living death of his injury.
To be clear, the soldier is not even restrained. He's just sitting there before a deadly weapon, while the scientist who just dismissed the technology enabling him to speak once more, is sitting inches away from him, his back turned.
Guess what happened next? You guessed it, a gruesome bloodbath. Most of us will not have needed to be told what came next because it is unbelievably obvious. You'd have to be an idiot not to realise what the writer is setting up.
Our genius scientist turns his back on his unstable, unrestrained patient after providing him with a deadly weapon, conveniently placed a few inches in front of the soldier's hands. There are no guards nearby, despite the fact that this is obviously a military facility. No kill switch, which could turn off the implant with a single, safer press of a button... nothing. Not a single precaution.
And we're supposed to believe this man a genius, an expert on artificial intelligence? The rest of the movie is filled with similar, oh great that'll move the plot forward nonsense, which no intelligent person would believe. I'm not exaggerating. Almost every scene I suffered through had similar immersion breaking elements - and that combined with appalling acting and perishingly thin character work led me to bail before the first painful hour had gone by.
Avoid.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
03/22/25
Full Review
Axel X
"The Machine" is one of the most enjoyable movies I've seen in a long time. I didn't know that this was an indie sci-fi film. These are the types of movies that I really enjoy seeing the most. Because, not to sound like a hipster, but in mainstream movies like "The Avengers" or "The Fast and The Furious" that spend millions of dollars on special effects it's refreshing to see a movie where you can tell that they have a limited budget at their disposal and yet they're still able to make the movie look great.
This is not to say that I don't like "The Avengers" and yes I enjoyed The Fast and the Furious as movie junkfood for myself, but it's interesting to see how people decide to make their movies when they have such a low budget. One such movie that I personally enjoyed a lot despite all its flaws was a movie called "Ink." Which is a movie that I would highly recommend despite it's numerous plot holes and really bad editing. "The Machine" has flaws of its' own, but the director Caradog W. James made a really good movie here and for his first try I thought it was great.
I feel almost as though the director of "Ex Machina", which was a good movie as well, stole a lot of the ideas from this movie. They both have a plot that centers on Artificial Intelligence, they ask the question how safe is artificial intelligence, the robots with the artificial intelligence in both movies are female AND they're both named AVA. And at this point I'm totally convinced that Alex Garland stole a lot of what he wrote in Ex Machina from "The Machine."
But I don't really mind because both movies were entertaining and engaging in their own ways. With "The Machine" though the biggest difference is in how the main robot interacts with the world. Because by nature AVA in "The Machine" responds to the world with emotions that while they seemed fake to me, in the end AVA proved that she had feelings for the person that created her. And in the movie "Ex Machina" in the end that Ava really didn't care about her creator or the guy who was doing the Turing test on her.
One thing I really liked about "The Machine" was that a lot of the scenes were very well lit in a way that which made the settings look even better than they probably were. And the special effects that were used looked amazing. There was this one scene that which I particularly enjoyed in which the machine had broken out of its containment and was naked. However we couldn't really see anything (which was rather disappointing), but it was just a beautiful scene when she started dancing and the machinery inside of her was lighting up as she danced. And the light given off from the laboratory was a blue color while the color coming from her was a red color. And I thought that was a beautiful scene of contrasting colors.
If I had to choose between "Ex Machina" and "The Machine" as to which movie was better I think I would have to go with "The Machine" mainly because "The Machine" unlike "Ex Machina" actually had a happier ending and plus if Alex Garland did steal the idea of "The Machine" and put them into "Ex Machina" I would say that it was wrong of him to do that no matter what the result of "Ex Machina" were. Even though "Ex Machina" was a fantastic movie, this one was better.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
01/24/24
Full Review
Tim O
Watched this and 2015's 'Uncanny' back to back: Neither one held up as particularly memorable or likely to stick around for future rewatches...
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
12/18/23
Full Review
Joe W
Maybe worth watching. Maybe not. Movie is a bit like the much better Ex Machina. Here characters are shallow and and behave so very inconsistently in order for the plot to work.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
10/21/23
Full Review
Audience Member
while i did enjoy it, i just wanted more to happen. it's a slow start, but you can tell it's building up to something bigger, which is exciting, but then when you're expecting absolute terror to reign down on everybody, 1 guy's skull gets crushed & that's it. so it was a pretty anti-climactic solution with a rather rushed ending afterwards. if you don't have anything better to do it's a decent watch, but i wouldn't go out of my way to recommend it.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/20/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Adoro filmes de ficção cientifica, com teor tecnológico futurista robótico, um draminha, um romance fofinho, criancinhas fofas sofridas, robozinhos com sentimentos, perseguições, tiroteios, malvados inescrupulosos, bons efeitos, boa trama, adorável…
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/12/23
Full Review
Read all reviews
Continue with Google
>
