TRANSCENDENCE: Turding Test

Director: Wally Pfister
Writer: Jack Paglen
Cast: Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Cillian Murphy, Kate Mara, Cole Hauser, Morgan Freeman
Runtime: 119 mins.
2014

Transcendence was clearly positioned as a buoyancy project for frequent Christopher Nolan cinematographer Wally Pfister to break into directing with some high concept philosophical sci-fi. Transcendence was also clearly positioned as a solvency project for decomposing megastar Johnny Depp to remain in the public imagination without putting too much effort in. I doubt either of them got much of what they wanted out of this project.

Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is a famous scientist who gets poisoned by an anti-tech terrorist movement, so his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and friend Max (Paul Bettany) attempt to graft his consciousness to their burgeoning Artificial Intelligence project. It works, but as digi-Will starts to amass power, many folks become slightly irked by the idea of an AI overlord. This is all so much less interesting than it sounds.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly where Transcendence goes wrong, which often indicates bad direction. The film seems committed to only exploring its ideas with the most facile surface probings. IIf a movie doesn't thrive on its ideas, you have the meat and potatoes of human drama to fall back on, another aspect that Transcendence fumbles. How are we to care about how human digi-Will is or isn't if the original human Will was basically a walking corpse already? Most of Depp's work in this movie is as a monotonous floating head, which is perhaps a blessing because the actor doesn't seem invested at all. The character is theoretically charismatic, but Depp can barely muster a sickly smirk through his wine hangover. Pfister lacks the grace to mask any of this, or maybe he doesn't care. One thing that can be said about this film is that there are some somewhat lovely visuals, which probably indicates that the director's former line of work was his correct one.

If you want a deeper dive into the dumb as a doorstop world of Transcendence, I guested on a podcast with Jenna Kuerzi to talk about the film in great detail. Check out our episode of Depp Impact here.

0.5 / 5  BLOBS