Hurray for Johnny Depp playing a regular, normal human being in a movie in the first time in seemingly forever; he’s not a faux Native American or a vampire or a pirate or a murderous barber or a breakdancing Mad Hatter. Nope, just a regular old scientific genius in Transcendence! Too bad, though, that the movie seems to care very little about that actual science. Instead, this is a frustratingly opaque script, a wasted ensemble cast, and an obvious “message” that makes Transcendence a pretty mediocre way to spend two hours.
Here’s the thing: We’ve been questioning the limits of technology, and the dangers of that limitlessness, in cinema for a very long time. I could point all the way back to 2001: A Space Odyssey, or at the modern classic The Matrix, which turns 15 years old this year (pour one out for the perfection of Keanu Reeves’s cheekbones in that movie). Regardless, the suggestion that it’s humans who corrupt the boundaries of discovery is not new; even as we’ve dealt with the evil HAL and the ever-multiplying Mr. Smith, fundamentally we’re used to the idea that in the wrong hands, science could be dangerous. And yet Transcendence tries to give us that exact same message like it’s a whole new thing, like it’s an idea no one has ever encountered before. Boo.
From first-time director Wally Pfister, who has served as Christopher Nolan’s cinematographer for years, I would expect better. But it’s the story from first-time Jack Paglen that’s really the problem here. There’s the genius scientist angle, of course, but also the love-triangle angle, the abused wife angle, and the technological anarchists angle, and the wise old mentor angle, and the FBI agent angle. There are too many angles! The movie ends up being all edges, without enough natural storytelling flow. It’s impressive how little tension there is in a movie that is ostensibly supposed to be about a human/computer hybrid that wants to take over the world.
The premise is this: Dr. Will Caster (Depp) and his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), as well as their close friend Max (Paul Bettany), are at the forefront of a scientific revolution. Through extremely advanced software design and nanotechnology, the three of them think they have created a self-sustaining computer, an “intelligent machine” that functions like a human brain. For Will, the PINN (“physically independent neural network”) is his life’s work. He wants to understand how the world works; Evelyn wants to save it; and Max wants to save the people on it. With this breakthrough, they think they can get there.
Except for where not everyone agrees with Will’s ideas; in fact, there’s one anti-technology group, RIFT, which goes so far as to kill to stop the “intelligent machine.” A coordinated attack on labs connected with the Casters leaves researchers dead and Will dying, shot with a bullet traced with radiation poisoning. With only a few weeks left for him to live, Evelyn comes up with a crazy idea: uploading Will’s consciousness onto PINN, sending his neural network into the “physically independent” structure. It’s insane, Max says, but he’ll help her do it.
And when they succeed—to Evelyn’s amazement and Max’s regret—and Will’s consciousness goes inside the computer, and then the Internet, is when the film tries to probe at the how-much-science-is-too-much question. It’s a foregone conclusion that Will wants more power, that his genius can’t be contained within the structural limitations we’re accustomed to. But as Transcendence tries to deal with moral or ethical questions, it can’t do it gracefully. There’s never any question that Will’s consciousness might be dangerous to Evelyn and the world, because everyone tells us so—Max, Morgan Freeman’s mentor character, Cillian Murphy’s FBI agent. And there’s never any attention paid to explaining any of this science so that we can decide for ourselves. Everything, from Will’s engineering of plant life to his curing of human wounds, is done through “synthetic nanotechnology,” and that’s one of those phrases that means everything and nothing at once.
Without any care for helping the audience to understand what’s going on onscreen, Transcendencejust marches along toward the conclusion it gives you in the first five minutes of the film. There’s no surprise here; no nuance. And without any understanding of its subject matter or any interest in making others understand, either, Transcendence gives you very little reason to care.
Rating: 2 out of 5 Guttenbergs
Posts
