15 Greatest Hard Science Fiction Movies Of All Time

Several years after writing the screenplay for Danny Boyle's Sunshine, Alex Garland finally took to the director's helm himself for Ex Machina, a low budget British science fiction film starring Domhall Gleeson, Oscar Issac and Alicia Vikander.

Taking place almost entirely in the remote home/research facility of tech company CEO Nathan Bateman (Issacs), Ex Machina unwraps the conundrum of artificial intelligence as programmer Caleb Smith (Glesson) tries to assess whether or not a newly developed robot named Ava (Vikander) is capable of human emotion and independent thought. As the tests continue and Caleb becomes increasingly attached to the robot, he begins to question the nature of his own identity.

There's a classiness to the visuals in Ex Machina which belies its low budget, but the ideas behind the film are what makes it so effective and compelling. The nature of human consciousness remains a hazy concept to scientists to this day, and Ex Machina's exploration of AI in this context is handled with a suitable degree of complexity which leaves the viewer with as many questions as answers, as all good speculative hard science fiction should.