Ex Machina (2015)

"A young programmer is selected to participate in a breakthrough experiment in artificial intelligence by evaluating the human qualities of a breathtaking female A.I."

If you are looking for a really talky but R-rated version of Steven Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" (2001), or just want to see Kike Maíllo's far superior "Eva" (2011) rehashed with a couple of different twists, "Ex Machina" is for you.

It's not that "Ex Machina" is a bad movie per se, since the camerawork is great, the sets and effects are perfect, and the acting is totally convincing. It's just that there isn't really a lot to this extremely slow-moving sci-fi, and there isn't enough of anything apart from some brief nudity and a nifty disco-dancing routine to make it memorable. It's definitely more of a drama than anything else, and like "Maggie", it makes you wonder if the story and its tropes couldn't have been played out on a purely human level without any gimmicks.

Why make the robot a beautiful girl? Why make her sexual? All that is explained in the dialogue at some length, and it's important to the plot, but I'm sure that the fauxminists will still bitch and whine about this aspect to get pageviews. Good luck to them. Nobody cares. It's only another movie with no deep and meaningful political agenda unless someone wants to make more out of it than they should. And sadly, with over 300 external reviews of "Ex Machina" currently posted on the IMDb, I know that at least one person already has done. Pathetic.

Obviously, Alicia Vikander almost steals the show as the beautiful robot Ava, but it's fair to say that Domhnall Gleeson (as Caleb) and Oscar Isaac (as Nathan) hold up well against her. In fact, the double-twist makes the whole ménage à trois (albeit with some minor characters) worthwhile. It's very predictable in the the way that you kind of expect what happens to happen but not in the way it does, and most people probably won't see the ending coming. In that respect, the story is very well played indeed.

Directed and written by Alex Garland (of "28 Days Later" and "Dredd" fame), what "Ex Machina" lacks in originality, it makes up for in uncluttered calmness and downplayed spectacle. There's even a bit of sexual tension here and there but not too much. Kids could watch this. They won't understand most of it, of course, but an R-rating seems unnecessarily harsh. Oh wait, it's America, so healthy nudity is the most heinous evil ever and violent death is perfectly acceptable. I get it now.

In short, "Ex Machina" is another robot with artificial intelligence movie but is none the worse for that. The better robot movie is still "Eva", and "Bicentennial Man" (1999) is arguably the emotional best, but "Ex Machina" is a competent addition to the sci-fi genre.

Recommended for a rainy Sci-Fi Saturday night.

Chappie (2015)

"In the near future, crime is patrolled by a mechanised police force. When one police droid, Chappie, is stolen and given new programming, he becomes the first robot with the ability to think and feel for himself."

There's not much to say about this one. "Chappie" is little more than a mixture of half a dozen better movies including "Short Circuit" (1986) and "RoboCop" (1987) plus a huge dollop of the South African "Zef" group Die Antwoord.

None of that means that "Chappie" isn't enjoyable, highly watchable, or entertaining, but it does make any claim to originality null and void. Not that anyone ever claimed that this R-rated movie's storyline was anything original, as far as I know.

Having some touching scenes during the robot Chappie's development which are full of pathos, Yo-landi Visser proves that she can act better than most of the cast around her. Ninja, her partner from Die Antwoord, comes across less sympathetically and doesn't appear to be acting at all, although he seems much nicer to people online. Fans of Die Antwoord who understand the personas involved should have nothing to complain about.

Also notable is Hugh Jackman who for once plays against type. As an entrepreneurial weapons designer who ends up becoming the bad guy, when he gets his just desserts, the payoff is more than satisfying. Contrarily, a very small role for Sigourney Weaver isn't worth mentioning, and Dev Patel from "Slumdog Millionaire" (2008) doesn't even try to emulate his breakout performance.

Apart from that, there's no more to say about "Chappie" other than it looks good and has a story to tell which will keep most action/sci-fi fans engrossed for its duration. "Chappie" is a fun movie rather than a serious one, and it's arguably a lot of style over substance, but with such great visuals, there's nothing wrong with any of it.

Another winner from Neill Blomkamp. Highly recommended.

If you haven't heard of Die Antwoord before, please check out their official website or watch the video below.

The World's End (2013)

"Five friends who reunite in an attempt to top their epic pub crawl from 20 years earlier unwittingly become humankind's only hope for survival."

Since I've been discovering far too many good movies recently, rather than tempt fate to throw a load of bad ones my way, I decided to redress the balance with a day of more torture than one person should ever have to endure. There may be no power on Earth which could ever get me to rewatch "Shaun of the Dead" (2004), but I finally watched "Hot Fuzz" (2007) and followed it up with "The World's End". Such a heroic act has to keep karma quiet for a while, doesn't it?

Although I can freely admit that I enjoyed "Hot Fuzz" almost until the end, I only did so as it was a kind of half-way house between the greatness of "Men Behaving Badly" (the British version) and the smarmy creepiness of Mitchell and Webb's "Peep Show" to prepare me for worse to come. Laddish comedy is so '90s and over now that movies such as "The Cornetto Trilogy" (or whatever the Hell these are called) are little more than throwbacks. I liked Olivia Colman's character, was amazed at how realistic Simon Pegg was as a far too politically correct cop, but the running gag with the swan stole the show. Let's face it, "Hot Fuzz" is only a comedic homage to "The Wicker Man" with a couple of lovely gore scenes anyway. Adam Buxton wearing a piece of church as a head is memorable, but nothing else.

I don't know what it is about the combination of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (with Edgar Wright as the director) which irritates me so much. It's not as if any of them owe me money or something; I just have a completely irrational loathing of them based on their movies. Thus, as you can imagine, I really wasn't looking forward to "The World's End"—even the title gave away that it was going to be yet another pub-centric fiasco which isn't funny—but surprisingly, I wasn't dead set against it either. If anything, my pre-movie mood could be described as hesitantly curious.

The thing you have to remember is that I have absolutely no sense of humour. It just doesn't exist for me in any kind of "laughing out loud" way, so I tend to watch comedies as dramas and note the wit, stunts, or happy endings which would place the subject matter in the correct category. When it comes to comedy, I'm 100% objective because I have no physical way of being subjective about it. For that reason, I can say everything that I need to say about "The World's End" in a few quick paragraphs.

Stop reading now if you don't want spoilers!

"This is a pub! We are in a pub! What are we going to do now?"

"The World's End" is very good indeed for the first 40 minutes. It's nicely filmed, the backstory is well told as an introduction, the characterisation is decent, the location is perfectly British, and several recognisable TV faces make everything comfortable. The witty banter reveals that the former bad boy hero is now a bit of a dick, his friends are easily led, and they're all uncommonly stupid, but it's aimiable enough. Sadly, everything goes horribly wrong when the first robots (or "blanks") appear. The whole mood of the film is killed in one fell swoop and never recovers afterwards.

What would have been better as a straightforward comedy about the reunion of old schoolfriends who reveal their secrets and discover a few more during a pub crawl then turns into a stupid parody of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"! WTF? WTF indeed! It's a pity that "Shaun of the Dead" already covered zombies because aliens are too far-fetched and ridiculous to be entertaining for me. I don't believe in aliens, I'm not even sure that there's intelligent life left on this planet, let alone anywhere else in the universe, and if there's one thing which will make me switch the channel on the TV instantly, it's anything about aliens. Unfortunately, you can't do the same thing in a movie theatre, and walking out wastes $12.

After a few text-speak jokes, the second-half of "The World's End" is a bunch of repetitive fight scenes which become extremely tedious by the third or fourth time they happen. There are, after all, only so many robot arms and legs you can pull off or eggshell heads you can crush before the action scenes fall into the same trap as the running-joke about "Starbucking" and identical-looking pubs. Needless to say, the carefully crafted characters are lost among the spectacle of effects and explosions, some of them physically. What a shame.

As I'm not down with the kids, I don't know if Pierce Brosnan's cameo is meant to be a special secret or a selling point, but either way, you know about it now. His former "Die Another Day" Bond-girl Rosamund Pike is on the alternative posters, so you already know that she's in this and is just as easy on the eye 11 years later. She doesn't have a very big role either, but ironically, she's on screen more than Pierce Brosnan in this movie.

Maybe if I had been as drunk as the characters were supposed to be, "The World's End" might been more entertaining, but I didn't completely hate it. Despite easily being the second weakest of the three Pegg-Frost-Wright movies and ending with a half-arsed swipe at our de-humanising reliance on modern technology, I'm sure comedy fans would get something out of it. It's simply a film of two halves—and twelve pints—which, just like this review, isn't very well written. That shitty ending which I'm sure everyone thought would be so clever is still too rushed, disappointing and unsatisfying for everyone except the characters themselves though. Stupidly, I expected more.

Placing the three movies in order of merit, I can now rate "Shaun of the Dead" as the weakest with 1 out of 10, "The World's End" gets 3 out of 10, and "Hot Fuzz" is the best of a bad lot with 4 out of 10. Thank God, I will never have to watch any of them again.

"I know all about you - sex for dinner, death for breakfast"

Eva (2011)

"A shy genius is employed by his former university to design robot software."

Although "Eva" is really sci-fi, I needed something for "Fantasy Friday", and it fits this category too. In fact, it's closer to being a "Frankenstein"-esque fairytale than anything else, and for those of you who've noticed a theme going on this month, yes, it's another beautiful Spanish movie. I've been watching more foreign movies recently than ever before due to the lack of decent English language titles, but that will change again next week because I haven't got many new ones left.

Not to be confused with Peter Dickinson's YA novel of the same name (which I know you've never heard of!), "Eva" is about robots rather than chimpanzees, but it still brings up the same questions about life, consciousness, and what makes us what we are. The subject matter is a staple of sci-fi books and movies, so it's not the most original story in the world, and there are similarities to "Bicentennial Man" (1999) and "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" (2001).

I'm not going to knock the big Hollywood robot movies which are obviously excellent, but I enjoyed "Eva" just as much as "Bicentennial Man" and more than "A.I. Artificial Intelligence". Apart from a twist which I didn't see coming (but should have done!), there's a cat robot in "Eva" which is outstanding, plus I'm kind of in lust with Marta Etura who plays Lana. If you don't know who she is, check out "Sleep Tight" (2011) and "Los Últimos Días" (2013).

Marta Etura and Claudia Vega.

Detractors may say that "Eva" is too slow, overuses long shots, and the characters don't have much depth, but I disagree. There are no pacing problems, and the cinematography is very good indeed. The characters could have been fleshed out a little bit more, especially in the case of Alex Garel (played by Daniel Brühl) who is a bit boring even for a scientist, but there's enough made of them to tell the story. Bearing in mind that a 20 minute prologue (which is included on the Spanish Blu-ray) was removed to give more emphasis to the twist, the characters weren't originally so flat.

As "Eva" isn't set that far ahead in the future, there aren't too many weird effects used except at the robot lab and every time Alex runs his computer program. Some people may find that disappointing, but I didn't. Less is more, as they say, and the snowy location covers a multitude of sins. There are plenty of robots if you look for them including little horses, dogs, more traditional machines, and, of course, the cute prototype 519. Channelling Robin Williams slightly, Lluís Homar undoubtedly steals the show as creepy servant-robot Max. His menace is a total red herring though and is completely unintentional. In this movie, it's the "free robots" that you have to be careful of.

Claudia Vega as Eva.

Horror fans will notice several similarities to "Splice" (2009) but without the incestuous implications. Claudia Vega who plays Eva isn't as sexualised as some reviewers suggest despite a couple of scenes which might make you wonder. If anything, she comes across like a nicer version of the little girl in "Sleep Tight", and her use of age-inappropriate dialogue is meant as a clue to her secret instead of turning her into another Esther from "Orphan" (2009). I can't say any more about that without spoiling the movie for you, but it doesn't take a genius to work it out.

According to a rumour on the IMDb, the Weinsteins will be distributing "Eva" in the USA later this year. In what format, I have no idea, but I expect there will be a dubbed version for the hard of understanding, and an inevitable Hollywood remake eventually. For now, I recommend importing the English subtitled Blu-ray from Amazon.

Pacific Rim (2013)

"As a war between humankind and monstrous sea creatures wages on, a former pilot and a trainee are paired up to drive a seemingly obsolete special weapon in a desperate effort to save the world from the apocalypse."

Do you want to know what irritates me beyond belief? Films like this and the fanboys who overpraise them.

For a start, "Pacific Rim" is a kids' Summer movie meant for little ADHD kids who like lots of robots, whirling things and huge explosions. It's not meant for adults even though there's a growing subculture of "weeaboo", "otaku" (Japanese for "idiots"), games console loving, overweight, comicbook convention nerds who all live in their parents' basements, grow neckbeards, and refer to the big robots as "Mecha" for some reason that I don't fully understand.

"Pacific Rim" is clearly not a movie meant for anyone of my generation (or the one below) except that a few sad acts who think it's hilariously ironic to praise utter shite have bought into it. It's those same hipsters who think that "Sharknado" is "kewl" and spend their entire lives collecting other ironically named movies and little dollies of Japanese cartoon characters. I despise them all.

So guess what I thought of the film after having been duped into watching it by Cosplaying internet friends who need to stop playing dress-up and grow up instead? Yes, that's right, I HATED IT!

Having never been a fan of Billy the Bull (Guillermo del Toro) or Michael Bay's "Transformers" movies, and being a hater of 99% of sci-fi movies anyway, there's nothing in "Pacific Rim" for me other than a lot of boredom.

I tweeted my displeasure throughout the movie, but I'm not going to repost all my Tweets this time. I may have only done that twice before, but the novelty has worn off. However, because it's Saturday, it's hotter than balls again, my neighbours' noisy brats are screaming outside my window, and I can't be bothered to dissect a movie from a genre that I have no interest in, I'm going to give you a list of bullet points of everything wrong with "Pacific Rim" instead of writing a real review.

SPOILERS FOLLOW.

Everything I hated about Pacific Rim.

I have no idea who any of these people are.

• Rated PG-13. Gah!
• Pathetic faux Jap-comicbook crap turned into live action for little kids and weeaboos.
• The rift in time and space which aliens pop through sounds just like "Torchwood" 6 years ago.
• Naming the robots after an alcoholic beverage was a smart move, but even if I was drunk, I still wouldn't enjoy this movie.
• The alien monsters look stupid and are named after turds.
• 75% of the film is all "yak yak yak" with no action.
• Unrealistic, clichéd dialogue.
• It's 4 days too long! Actually, it's only 2 hours, but it feels like more.
• Gormless-looking Owen from "Torchwood" is in it... as a German.
• Psycho Sean Slater from "Eastenders" is in it... and he clearly still has anger issues.
• Basically, Billy the Bull got the cheapest actors possible and spent the majority of the budget on computer game effects.
• Ron Perlman got millions of dollars for showing his big hairy face for all of 5 minutes.
• It's a sausagefest! No eyecandy for heterosexual men.
• Memento Mori (or whatever her name is) isn't bad looking if you like that kind of thing, but I don't.
• No sexy fun time or other nudity.
• The acting is horrible. The accents are all over the place.
• Americans playing Brits, Brits playing Australians, Brits playing Americans, Australians playing Americans... and they have Asian surnames because presumably there weren't any male Asian actors available at the time.
• In the fight between Psycho Sean Slater and the other guy who looks just like him, you can't tell who is who.
• It's "Starship Troopers" but without the humour or exciting action.
• The scientist isn't Doogie Howser but he still mindmelds with an alien.
• No characters worth caring about.
• Psycho Sean Slater kisses a dog. Typecast much?
• No originality whatsoever. The plot is much the same as "Oblivion" but without Tom Cruise or the twist.
• The action is like watching the cutscenes from a computer game which somebody else is playing.
• Big robots that weigh more than several skyscrapers are (and have to be) carried into position by little tiny helicopters which could never support their weight in real life.
• Making tunnels under the city for people to hide in saves a fortune on CGI-ing little people.
• Watching two guys wearing spacesuits play Dance Dance Revolution inside a giant robot while fighting the "Cloverfield" monster is not fun.
• Almost as many buildings get destroyed as in "Man of Steel".
• Too many quick cuts, too much confusion, and it's hard to tell who is doing what to who or why.
• No one cares about who is doing what to who or why anyway.
• The cooler robots get destroyed before they have chance to do anything.
• It's all very, very loud just to keep you awake.
• 100% predictable and instantly forgettable.
• I would rather watch WWF/WWE with two fat dudes in Godzilla suits fighting each other than this crap. Same result too. Dull and fake.
• The Asylum could make a better movie. Oh wait, they already have: "Atlantic Rim".
• "Pacific Rim" is more boring than "World War Zzzzzzz".
• Even "Iron Man 3" is better than this!
• Inevitably, there will be a porn parody and a sequel.

I could go on, but you get the idea. I don't have anything good to say about "Pacific Rim" whatsoever.

Transformers + Torchwood + Cloverfield + Starship Troopers + Oblivion + cheap TV actors (and a couple of former Eastenders) + CGI robots fighting CGI monsters = Pacific Rim.

Don't waste your money!