Rewatch: Why 'Ex Machina' Is Even Scarier Four Years Later

Unlike technology, sometimes science fiction improves with age. Double Take is Popular Mechanics' look back at sci-fi classics that have something prescient to say about today. Four years ago, when Alex Garland's instant sci-fi classic Ex Machina debuted, it dropped into a different era--the time before Cambridge Analytica, before Russian election trolling, before the catastrophic Equifax leak and too many others like it. We'd spent decades knowing our personal data could be hacked, leaked, and abused by nefarious parties, of course. But back then, people tended to worry along individual lines, about a stolen identity or a maxed-out account--not the data-driven mass manipulation that has been repeatedly uncovered over the past few years.