6 Blockbusters From 2015 That Almost Had Completely Different Endings

3. Audiences Experience Ava's Escape Through Her "Eyes" - Ex Machina

Ex Machina emerged as one of the biggest sleeper hits of the year - an incredibly small and complex sci-fi gem that managed to make its budget back twice over at the box office. Written and directed by Alex Garland (author of The Beach), it's certainly one of the most interesting science-fiction movies of the last few years - not to mention it had a brilliant and shocking ending that nobody could have seen coming. At the climax of Ex Machina, then - which tells the story of an experiment which sees a young computer programmer called Caleb attempting to discover whether an A.I. named Eva (played by Alicia Vikander) has achieved conciousness - sees Eva tricking Caleb and escaping from the facility in which she was created, leaving him to die, via helicopter. But the original ending was a little more freakish in its make-up. As actress Alicia Vikander tells it, the ending was supposed to include a moment in which audiences would have learned something intriguing about Eva's operating system: "It was line," she said, " it was a very cool thing. You saw his face moving, but from her point of view, it was just like pulses and sounds coming out. That€™s what she reads." In essence, the moment was supposed to showcase what Ava "sees" - that, despite her perceived conciousness throughout the film, she's still completely different to us and isn't experiencing things as humans do in any identifiable way. Oscar Isaac, who plays Nathan Bateman, Ava's creator in the movie, expanded on this version of the ending:

"All of a sudden it would cut to her point of view. And her point of view is completely alien to ours. There€™s no actual sound; you€™d just see pulses and recognitions, and all sorts of crazy stuff, which conceptually is very interesting. It was that moment where you think, €˜Oh she was lying!€™ But maybe not, because even though she still experiences differently, it doesn€™t mean that it€™s not consciousness."

Alex Garland ultimately decided against going this way, though, as he preferred to settle on the ambiguous nature of Ava's conciousness. Certainly, had he opted to go with the first version of Ex Machina's ending, Ava might have been perceived as less sympathetic, and one of the best things about the movie is that audiences come away siding with her.