I was all set to skewer “Ex Machina” (2015).  I thought that the title smacked of cliche and pretense, and it looked so much like a boiler-plate boy-meets-girlbot maudlin melodrama.  How wrong I was — this movie deserves a 9 out of 10 for being the smartest and most surprising film I have seen in recent memory.

I won’t say much, for fear of spoilers.  All three leads handed in perfect performances — Alicia Vikander is simply fantastic as an example of artificial intelligence, and this is coming from a nerdboy who has rewatched everything from “Blade Runner” to “2001: A Space Odyssey” to Ron Moore’s “Battlestar Galactic.”   Man, how amazing would it be to watch a film in which the HAL 9000 is her adversary?  (I want to say more here about that, but won’t spoil why it would be so interesting.)

If you are watching this movie and think it is descending into cliche and predictability, stay with it.  I counted no fewer than four major twists by the story’s conclusion.  One is predictable; the remaining three are not.  And the last one is a real killer.  I was all set to write up an account of the story’s plot holes, but director Alex Garland was 10 steps ahead of me the entire time.

My only two remaining criticisms are pretty mild, and they are echoing other reviewers.  One, this movie is a bit long and slowly paced.  Two, we see extremely little action, which wouldn’t have been gratuitous if the story called for it.  The one “action” sequence we see is also underwhelming and poorly staged.  (Its combatants seem to be on heavy doses of lithium.)  Please, people, do not pay for a ticket thinking you are about to see an action-thriller … Or … even a quickly paced thriller.

Don’t let those quibbles bother you, though.  This is a great cerebral science fiction movie.