Film review: Transcendence is dull and based on bad science

TRANSCENDENCE
Starring: Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Paul Bettany
Director: Wally Pfister
Category: IIB

Although the title makes it sound like a groovy hippy movie about finding yourself, Transcendence is a lame science-fiction film that will bore viewers to death rather than elevate them to a higher spiritual realm.

The directorial debut by top cinematographer Wally Pfister (director of photography for The Dark Knight trilogy and Memento, among other films), it takes a set of modern scientific concepts about artificial intelligence and dumbs them down to a ridiculous level — and that’s not even mentioning the zombies...

Even fans of the charismatic Johnny Depp will be disappointed because, after mumbling away in a practically indecipherable voice for the extended prologue, he spends the rest of the movie as a twodimensional image on various computer screens.

The set-up is promising. Depp plays Will Caster, a super-brainy scientist who has discovered the holy grail of artificial intelligence: how to make a computer become self-aware. After delivering a speech on the many benefits of the new technology, he’s assassinated by a terrorist group who believe that intelligent computers pose a threat to humanity. (They had obviously taken The Terminator to heart.) Then the story goes completely awry. Before he dies, Will’s mind is uploaded to his computer by his scientist colleague-wife Evelyn (Rebecca Walsh) and friend Max (Paul Bettany).