Technology has historically proven to be a potent source of fear. Any time some new big advancement comes along, it usually follows that a movie about how that advancement will kill us all will arrive as well. More often than not, these alarmist films aren't very good, as they're often governed by a severe lack of imagination from the filmmakers. Transcendence upholds that dubious tradition, tackling the potential horrors of the singularity in often silly, unconvincing ways.
Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is a leading expert in the field of artificial intelligence. Because of this, a radical terrorist group targets him for assassination. He is shot with a radioactive bullet, and is given about a month to live. Unwilling to let him go, his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) uploads his consciousness into a computer. In this new form, Will becomes all-powerful, and sets about reshaping the world as he sees fit. The program quickly goes too far, leaving a small contingent led by his former colleague Max Waters (Paul Bettany) to defy the machine's grand design.
It's all profoundly silly. While the film strives to serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unfettered technology, its utter lack of realism makes that a shaky proposition at best. And when we talk about realism, we aren't talking about the main concept, which is allowed a degree of artistic license. Where the film goes wrong is in the practical details of the plot. Will builds a giant community in the middle of the desert, and attracts zero attention from the authorities. He develops nanites that can essentially rebuild matter, but ends up still relying on human labor to do most of his work.
There is a weird lack of imagination in all this, a blind refusal to follow any of these ideas down to their logical end points. Basic logic is often ignored in order to further the plot. What occurs is largely absurd, with little sense of how humans actually function in the world today. And this would be fine if the film wasn't so insistent on its own seriousness. The film reaches levels of alarmist schlock comparable to the worst excesses of 90s techno thrillers, but it plays it all with nary a trace of a sense of humor.
Director Wally Pfister made his name working with Christopher Nolan, and he inherits his dourness, but none of his ability to stage ambitious action sequences. He does give the film a fairly appealing aesthetic, his camera sketching out the extremes of order and decay, the movie's central struggle made physical every time he cuts between locations. The acting is merely functional. Johnny Depp decides that being a computer means mumbling all his lines. And Rebecca Hall struggles to rise above her character's complete lack of sense.
If Transcendence was meant to terrify the populace, then it’s certainly failed. The scenario it sketches out will convince no one that the world is heading down a dangerous path. It's almost laughable when held up against another recent movie that tackled artificial intelligence, Spike Jonze's Her. Though ostensibly a romance, the film builds itself on a strong foundation of verisimilitude, and manages to put together a scenario that feels altogether plausible, and in some ways, deeply unsettling. Next to that, Transcendence feels like a lot of reactionary nonsense that just never got thought through.
My Rating:
