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, Transcendence
just 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
