“Transcendence” is directed by Wally Pfister and written by Jack Paglen. It stars Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman, Rebecca Hall, Kate Mara, Cillian Murphy, Cole Hauser, and Paul Bettany.
I’m not really sure where to begin when it comes to “Transcendence.” There’s no doubt in my mind people will be divided on it. Some people will love the ideas, thoughts, and execution and praise first time writer Jack Paglen and first time director Wally Pfister. Others will say Pfister, after spending so much time working with and learning under Christopher Nolan, tried his hardest to emulate a Nolan style film and didn’t try to create a Wally Pfister type film. Unfortunately, I fall in the second camp. Wally Pfister is an extraordinary cinematographer, one of the best working now. But in his first attempt calling all the shots, in my eyes he failed.
Dr. Will Caster (Depp) is an artificial intelligence researcher who had devoted his life’s work to create a machine that possesses both sentience and collective intelligence. His wife, Evelyn (Hall), is also a fellow computer scientist but is devoted to making a better future for the world by helping the environment and using her knowledge to cure sickness and disease. Will is on the verge of a breakthrough with his research, creating PINN (Physically Independent Neural Network), a potentially sentient computer that was designed to process history’s collective knowledge and combine it with a conscious mind, giving it emotions and independent thought. Unfortunately, Will is shot with a radioactively-tainted bullet by a member of the extremist organization RIFT (Revolutionary Independence from Technology), slowly killing him before he’s able to completely finish his work.
Evelyn and Max (Bettany), the closest friend of the Castor’s, attempt to take Will’s research to the limit and attempt to connect Will’s genius mind into PINN. Evelyn believes will they can’t save Will’s body, his mind remains intact and as strong as ever. If this works, Will would achieve what is called singularity which is the uploading of the human brain into a supercomputer. To Will, this is called Transcendence and while the possibilities would be infinite, Evelyn and Max are unsure of the dangers. While Max is just as smart as Will and Evelyn, he believes that there must be limitations to technology and as it looks like Will is reaching Transcendence, Max begins to see just how much damage he can do. Once Evelyn connects Will to the internet, he can do almost everything and anything. He’s a God…but even God’s can go too far.
I’ll say this right away — Paglen’s screenplay and his ideas are extremely interesting and definitely some that should be explored further. This idea of a potential sentient, God-like being aren’t impossible and could potentially happen in the future. But at its core, “Transcendence” is a love story that feels forced right from the start. With random images of nature, never ending voiceovers, and characters with confusing and unclear motivations, Paglen’s screenplay was either changed mightily before shooting or just wasn’t that good.
As for the performances, it really seemed like the actors and actresses tried to do what they could with the material given to them. Paul Bettany was easily the best of this star studded cast and continues to show that he’s one of the best actors currently working. Depp, Hall, Freeman, and Murphy just seem to roll on along as none of them are really given anything all that good to work with. From a technical perspective, “Transcendence” really didn’t get much help. Mychael Danna’s score (which I personally liked) never had the proper tone and just didn’t fit the scenes on screen. The editing…I won’t touch on that. It could have been the worst part of the movie.
I hope Wally Pfister continues to direct movies…the guy is talented at what he does and his experiences with Nolan certainly mean something. But with “Transcendence,” he took on a project that was ambitious for a first timer and he just couldn’t do it. The ideas of “Transcendence” deserve to be explored because of the potential possibilities it could lead to. It deserved better than the treatment that Paglen and Pfister gave to it. Maybe one day it’ll come up again in a movie, but “Transcendence” was so focused on making a love story that it never got around to evolving the themes and questions it gave us from the start.
-Joshua Kaye
