‘Ex Machina’ was good if you’ve never read any literary SF in your life. It was very routine. And the ending was completely random.
Random can be fun. The movies lag way behind literary SF because they’re so stuck in the 50s. Orson Scott Card had a long diatribe about this a few years ago, the short version is that movie SF was about 2 decades behind literary SF (which was OK because it was younger and had to learn) then got stuck. There’s some pushing it, Moon is another good one that breaks away from the old molds, but the blockbuster tent-poll SF is firmly grounded in the 50s (and earlier in some cases) and resolutely refuses to evolve. Subsequently even the stuff that’s moved past the 50s rarely gets past where lit SF was in the 60s, maybe the 70s. It just can’t gain the traction to evolve further. Movie SF can’t even manage to evolve to Cyberpunk, and THAT’S a 30 year old lit movement.