When you call your movie Transcendence, you might do really well to include some new ideas, some things viewers have never seen before, or even to really do your best to entertain the audience. But sadly, Transcendence offers none of these things and the resultant final picture is one so middling that it ultimately can’t be called anything but bad.
I am an absolute lover of film, often to a fault. I have to work a whole bunch of checks and balances into my film evaluation process because sometimes I can just fall in love with something and get swept up in the experience and look right past the various cracks in the veneer that a more analytically-bent mind would see immediately. Conversely, if a film is wildly subtle or slow-paced, I find myself being lured in to pay closer attention and try to parse out the intention behind the slowness or the vagary. My point is that I’m wired to want to love a movie, and often catch myself WORKING to like something. I’m usually able to identify this tendency, and realize that that is what simply not liking a movie feels like. When you are wired this way, to naturally work to love a film, experiencing full on cinematic boredom is a rare and unfortunate thing.
And Transcendence is straight up boring.
This movie thinks it is dealing with fascinating and relevant ideas, and also thinks it is a first rate sci-fi thriller. But that one chick getting turned into a robot in Superman 3 is more entertaining (and oddly terrifying?) than anything Johnny Depp is able to pull off in his journey from man to machine to next-level-being.
Okay, let me pull back the snark a little bit and offer some of what I did like about the film and why I wanted to see it in the first place.
Although the trailers did very little for me, my butt was in the seat for one reason alone: This is famed cinematographer Wally Pfister’s directorial debut! This Academy Award winning (Inception) cinematographer became a household name to me through his work on all of Christopher Nolan’s most recent films, and Nolan himself is credited as an executive producer on this film. But something is lost in the transition from cinematographer to director, and this project just flounders from very early on. The movie still looks quite good, with cinematographer Jess Hall (The Spectacular Now, Hot Fuzz) taking over shooting duties from Pfister. But Jack Paglan’s screenplay is where many of the problems originate, and Pfister’s subsequent inability to transform this lacking screenplay into something approaching a racing pulse is the nail in the coffin.
As Dr. Will Caster works toward his goal of creating an omniscient, sentient machine, a radical anti-technology organization fights to prevent him from establishing a world where computers can transcend the abilities of the human brain.
As the trailers have already covered, Transcendence attempts to be a sci-fi thriller set amidst the very topical ideas about the singularity, referred to in this film interchangeably with the title. I’m far from a science guy, but my understanding about the singularity theory is that at some point technology is going to hit a point where it exceeds the capacity of the human mind, and will begin to progress exponentially, leading to runaway progress and uncertainty. Wiki describes it better than I do. And the thing is: the singularity is totally relevant and fascinating! As a topic to hang a sci-fi thriller around, you can’t get much more potential dramatic heft. But as mentioned, Transcendence simply drops the ball and manages to take the thrilling questions about what mankind will look like when our technology surpasses us and work them into an inert story filled with nanobots and one-dimensional characters and attempts at action and profundity that land with repeated thuds.
Years ago I came across a documentary about futurist Ray Kurzweil, who is one of the people who have popularized this notion of the singularity. If you want to get thrilled, churn some crazy ideas around in your head, and ponder the potential of our collective futures, I highly recommend skipping Transcendence and checking out Transcendent Man, which is available for digital rental on many different platforms.
So Paglan’s script fumbles the ball when it comes to dealing with fascinating concepts in an exciting way. And then the overall thriller package that he attempts to house the ideas in also falters. Look, the cast is enormous and impressive. Not to mention fairly solid. Rebecca Hall and Paul Bettany are actually the stars of the thing, but you’ve got to have Depp’s name above the title card to get a movie like this wide-released, and Depp is at the very least the last of three leads in the film. Depp’s character perhaps undergoes the most change and so it could be argued that he is the lead character. But I digress, my point here is that the cast is largely doing their best with a DOA screenplay. (What drew them all to this project, I can’t quite sort out). A notable exception being the usually wonderful Kate Mara, who plays the platinum blonde de facto leader of an anti-technology terrorist group whose attacks on Will and Evelyn Caster’s AI work set the plot in motion. Somehow Mara delivers a remarkably poor performance, even though her character actually has something to do. Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy show up in this movie, along with a character actor favorite of mine, Cole Hauser, and their characters are almost entirely useless. They could all not be there and the movie would barely be affected.
In attempting to distill the concepts behind the singularity and place them in a mainstream, wide-audience thriller, Paglan dilutes the fascinating impact of the whole conversation around these ideas. And with an A-list cast and what I assume was a hefty budget, Pfister fills the screen with famous faces, attempts at big set pieces, and a WHOLE mess of nanobots and even super-soldier-type-villains, and all the while gets farther and farther away from any of the ideas that would’ve been the most interesting to explore. The whole story rests on the relationship between Hall’s Evelyn and Depp’s Will, with their close friend Paul Bettany as the awkward third wheel. Normally it is a great idea to hinge the stakes of your story around your core characters, but Transcendence offers no believable chemistry between our leads, then fails to offer set pieces that are anything more than what we’ve seen dozens of times in other thrillers, and then performs one of the greatest sins of all: it begins with the ending of the movie, then cuts to a “five years earlier” card and wholly deflates any sense of tension or mystery as to where the story is all going. A surer recipe for boredom would be hard to concoct.
And I’m Out.