For a movie filled with big ideas there really should be a lot more to say about Transcendence, a downright boring motion picture that turns a pretty fun concept into nothing more than a progression of disjointed, academic plot points, motivated by emotions we sure hear a lot about but never actually see on camera.
Johnny Depp plays Will Caster, a personality-free super genius on the verge of creating the world’s first artificially intelligent computer. When a Luddite terrorist organization led by Kate Mara assassinates him, his wife Rebecca Hall and doubtful associate Paul Bettany race against time to download his brain into the computer. What could possibly go wrong?
That’s a question someone really should have asked in the development phase, when the script for Transcendence could have been infused with the sort of passion necessary to drive a movie that is, at its core, more about obsession than the future of computer hard drives and nanotechnology. Rebecca Hall sacrifices so much to keep Will’s brain alive and feed his sudden, unexplained appetite for power that the only explanation for why such a smart person would bother – the kind of all-consuming, stupidity-breeding love it would take to devote years of one’s life to building suspicious, mind-controlling nanobots for your impersonal computer husband – should really be on the surface for all to see. Instead, Transcendence underplays everything. The plot of Transcendence requires Hall to be a proper mad scientist, but she never indulges in that “mad” part, making the film’s whole sequence of events seem positively forced.
In fact, Transcendence seems to have given up on humanity altogether, placing its focus entirely on rampant technological expansion that threatens a mankind. Too bad there’s no one worth saving. Transcendence trades stunt casting for proper characterization, trusting audiences to assume that just because Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy are playing minor characters that there must therefore be something interesting about them. All evidence to the contrary be damned.
Transcendence marks the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, Christopher Nolan’s longtime cinematographer, and it’s tempting to compare the two filmmakers since their styles both boast similar, steely veneers. But whereas Nolan’s films are all about career-minded professionals who eschew their pesky emotions because otherwise they would prove overwhelming, Pfister’s Transcendence pays mere lip service to the notion that there may be something recognizably mortal motivating his story. It’s hard to care about a threat when you don’t understand anyone who’s being threatened, and it’s equally hard to care about the hard science Transcendence pornographically showcases when the only impact it has is the limp justification for Pfister’s next perfunctory action sequence.
Transcendence seems to care a lot about the future of technology and the effect it will have on the world as a whole, so perhaps that explains Pfister’s calculated, robotic approach to the individuals living in it. They are meaningless cogs in a larger, more important piece of machinery. It’s hard not to feel a little insulted by proxy. Transcendence paints a very big picture but can’t seem to find a place for anyone to live in it, and the whole movie winds up looking down on all of us viewing this alleged masterpiece as unworthy of entertainment. It’s a graduate thesis with a tacked on, uninvolving thriller plot, so certain of its grand significance that it completely misses the whole point: that the supposedly inconsequential people who have no place in Transcendence’s world are the ones in the audience, eager to observe, but given nothing worth watching.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
