Transcendence Movie Review
Ironically one antonym for transcendence is failure.
Transcendence is one of the most difficult movies for a fan of hard core science fiction (and good film in general) to watch and review. It has all the best possible elements for a successful movie: interesting concept, talented cast, and a fat CGI budget. However, like a computer made of the best possible components but assembled using string, duct tape, and chewing gum the whole thing falls apart when you try to power it up.
The concept of artificial intelligence becoming self aware and trying to kill or enslave us as a sci fi trope is so old it almost predates the War of the Newts. It ultimately is the basis of the Terminator, War Games, Tron, the Matrix, West World, Blade Runner, and to a lesser extant 2001. If you actually read some books it shows up on a regular basis and does so because it is an intriguing concept and one that appeals to nerds like me. Also since it has long been my dream to one day be downloaded into a computer and live forever as an evil computer program you can imagine my disappointment when a film takes something so rich in fodder and proceeds to grow corpse flowers with it.
Where did this film fall apart? First of all, in a film chock full of talented actors the director had them all play out like computers themselves. Say what you will about Johnny Depp (like this is his fourth box office bomb in a row) but he is an actor who can convey emotions. However they pretty much had him do nothing but act like an Animatronic version of himself. His voice had absolutely zero inflection and his face never changed expression once, even when he was still human and informed of his imminent death. Morgan Freeman is another one who can deliver a powerful performance and get the audience to engage on an emotional level but when he witnesses the death of a dozen people he worked for years with he treats it with the angst normally reserved for opening a bathroom door and getting the faintest whiff of the last users two hour old fart. The supporting actors were all pretty much cardboard cutouts too. The only emotional portrayal by anyone was from Depps wife Evelyn but it was pretty clearly forced and the contrast to all the cardboard cutouts surrounding her made it even more garish. You can literally feel your interest drain away with every scene involving dialog or exposition.
The trailers sure made this film seem like there was going to be some kind of action but it was perfunctory at best. Nothing drains the tension from a scene like learning that shooting people and blowing stuff up does absolutely nothing when nanobots will repair any damage done in a few minutes. Why not have the actors run around and hit each other with teddy bears? It’s effectively the same.
Then there is the thinking part of the film. I am generally a fan of movies that make you think and this one had some interesting core concepts, such as the morality of self aware computers and forcing conformity on humans. However the film sat on the fence about being an action drama or an thinking film and like most movies that do so ended up with a fence post up its ass. There was very little debate actually going on and most of it boiled down to a few minutes at the beginning of “AI is evil” and “AI is good”. There was some moral struggling going on for one of the supporting characters as he jumps from one side to the other but really he just shifted gears at the exact moment the plot needed him to join the resistance, not from any evolutionary character arc.
And for every possible interesting concept there was the injection of flat out stupidity and painful suspension of disbelief. Hollywood should have learned from Independence Day that using a computer virus to pull the power on your enemies is farcical and boring. I guess having used an old sci fi concept the director felt he had license to cram as many sci fi movie ideas as possible with the cleanliness and oily smoothness of feeding a length of rebar into a meat grinder. By the end of the movie there were audience members laughing and I broke from my normal “scary loner” mien to ask a very pretty girl what she thought and she more or less felt the story was ham handed and lame (actually I was more intrigued at what a hot girl was doing by herself at a 10:15 showing in Jack London Square. Most of the loners that late look like Bond villain henchmen. I fit right in).
Then finally the pacing. 119 minutes and I spent most of them pushing my right foot into the floor in subconscious hope of finding the accelerator for the plot. Honestly the main plot (man downloads himself into a computer, turns into an evil AI, and tries to take over the planet) was established in the trailers. In traditional story telling Act 2 is where conflict arises and the drama is the protagonists working to overcome them. Having an evil computer work towards building an empire in a direction we all know he is going in does nothing for the drama. This film suffered from not actually having a protagonist per se but the “good” guys (some hippy anti-technology Burning Man escapees, an FBI guy, and Morgan Freeman) would only stick their heads up like prairie dogs once in a while to establish their presence for the denouement but honestly you spent half the movie trying to figure out if they were good or bad anyway. The plot, like the acting, was as flat and uninteresting as possible. It was like getting on the Merry Go Round and being stuck on one of the fixed (non up and down) horses.
The story. Will Castor (Johnny Depp-the Lone Ranger, Dark Shadows, Pirates of the Caribbean) is some kind of spacy computer genius who lives with his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall-the Prestige, Iron Man 3, the Town). He goes to lecture some computer geeks on advances in AI and gets shot by some anti technology nuts. Meanwhile the nuts attack a bunch of other computer labs and manage to kill off the entire team working with fellow researcher Joseph Tagger (Morgan Freeman-Oblivion, Now You See Me, the Lego Movie), a fact that really bums him out for like 10 minutes.
Turns out the bullet was radioactive and Will is going to die in a few weeks. Evelyn recruits another friend Max Waters (Paul Bettany-Priest, the Avengers, Blood) to hook him up to a computer and download his personality. They succeed but Max suddenly decides that AI Will is evil. He runs off to drink and gets kidnapped by the anti-tech people headed by Bree (Kate Mara-127 Hours, Shooter, Deadfall). They lock him in a cage and convince him that AIs are bad (something he more or less just decided on his own I thought?).
Evelyn uses millions of dollars Will pulled by high speed stock trading (oh, topical) to take over a crummy small town and turn it into a crummy small town with a massive solar powered data center. Will starts researching nanotechnology and figures out how to fix humans and coincidentally turn them into networked slaves. Fortunately all it takes is some copper netting to interrupt the network. The radicals are joined by the FBI guy and Morgan Freeman to attack. Stuff gets blown up and instantly fixed. Y2K finally happens (yes, they actually called it Y2K to the laughter of the audience) and the whole world sort of falls apart or something.
The stars:
Bold in concept. One star. Some great visuals, especially if you are turned on by the Apple Store. One star. Some attempt was made at an intellectual, topical story. One star. Ugh. I don’t want to bury this one in the rain of black holes I am about to unleash but that is all I can really think of. I guess I liked that a lot of it was set in East Bay, where I live? One star. Total: four stars.
The black holes:
A movie about artificial intelligence that had all the actors playing their roles like they were reprising the IRAC computer from Wonder Woman (try to out-nerd reference me, I dare you). One very ironic black hole. For all it’s pretension with regards to being a thinking film a lot of the stuff in here was pretty stupid. I bet you didn’t know brain probes could be installed by a computer guy with a power drill in an abandoned warehouse. One black hole. On the same note I’m going to hit this film for the base concept of Y2K, the use of that reference, and the implication that the worst part about it was no more power or internet rather than all of American devolving into anarchy and cannibalism in about three days. One black hole. There were implications that the question of machine intelligence and its morality were going to be addressed at some point but in fact the question was left to fester on it’s own like a roadkill possum on a hot day. One black hole. It’s clear the director really only wanted to film Rebecca Hall talking to a video screen of Johnny Depp and all the action and scenes that required a moving camera were done under protest with all the fiery heat of a bowl of soup left out overnight. One black hole. No protagonist to speak of, no antagonist, and no reason to care if anyone in the movie lived or died. A good film will get you to connect to at least one character. One black hole. Very predictable, and guilty of trying to pull in every sci fi reference possible without using any of them to add to the film. One black hole. Dull. Dull dull dull dull boring. Pacing from the slowest level of hell. One black hole. The film didn’t really end so much as sputter to a closing like a balloon leaking air. One black hole. Total: nine black holes.
So five black holes, putting this firmly in the bad film zone (although not in the brain aneurysm inducing zone. For that we need Michael Bay). Worth seeing at all? Sure, if you have long dreamed of what the love child of Skynet and Max Headroom would look like. It’s not awful on the Jack and Jill level. You won’t hate yourself any more after seeing it than you did before. Wait for Netflix. I feel bad pounding yet another spike in Johnny Depps career as I kind of like him, but really he has only himself to blame. He should take a few years off and come back as a drug addict or alcoholic like in Leaving Las Vegas. 
Date movie? Meh. Unless she loves computers (or is turned on by computer geeks. Pick up line joke comes from the cheap t shirt category) there is a lot in here a girl might find creepy (like Will taking over the body of another man in order to sex up Evelyn). I’d say pass. Bathroom break? Pretty much anywhere you like, although there is a scene where Evelyn is eating dinner with “Will” that is particularly worthless. It has already been established that she is having doubts about his humanity. Do we need to drag it out for another 10 minutes?
Thanks for reading. More to see soon (yes, I will see Heaven is Real but honestly I have my concerns). Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Feel free to post comments here on this film or my review and email me at [email protected] if you have off topic questions or suggestions. Have a great night. Talk to you soon.
Dave Inman
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