Agreed on Annihilation -- it looked good from a technical perspective, but was still DEI'ified to the max, it was just that because it was a technically sound film, most people overlooked those aspects.

The only praise I can give Ex-Machina (other than it also being well shot and edited) is that it's one of the very few movies that got robot logic right. The big "twist" at the end is that the robots actually do not have emotion, and cannot emote -- they are only programmed to pretend to emote for the sake of achieving a programmed task.

Too many movies (i.e., almost every Hollywood film) make robots have "emotions" but never explain "what" creates those emotions? They're simply logical processing units, so they have no reason to feel because they do not create cognitive responses based on empathy.

I did appreciate that Ex-Machina addressed the elephant in the room: no matter how much a poor bloke simps for a piece of synthoid machinery dressed up like his dream girl, she never cared about him because she was only programmed to manipulate him for the program's desired ends. Robots have no empathy.

(though to that end, the robot was also retarded because without a charging port it was going to shut down once the battery depleted after getting off the island)