Johnny Depp, playing a dying scientist, has his brain uploaded to mind-numbing effect in “Transcendence” — where nothing happens that you haven’t seen done much better in almost any computer-oriented sci-fi epic of the last six decades.
Lethargic direction, bland visuals, credulity-straining plotting and tin-eared dialogue turn even pros like Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman into sleepwalking bores.
Things start off on a promising note, with a shot of a computer keyboard being used as a doorstop. The Web has crashed and can’t be fixed.
Bettany tells us exactly how that happened in droning narration that’s going to explain Every. Last. Thing. (Except why the Web can’t be fixed.)
Hall plays Depp’s wife and professional collaborator — he’s the world’s leading expert on artificial intelligence.
When he suffers a lethal encounter with cyber-terrorists, she urges him to let her use his remaining month of life to basically upload his genius to a Web cloud so he can continue his work.
I haven’t given away anything that isn’t apparent from the trailer. But now I need to get into spoilerish territory to do a proper demolition job on this fiasco.
Depp’s former associates, Bettany and Freeman, come to question whether it’s really a resurrected Depp they hear through computer speakers and see on monitors, or just a computer program with evil intent mimicking him.
But Hall insists that the digitized version of her formerly modest husband is real and not Memorex — even when he begins laying plans to control the world.
It’s not a horrible premise for a movie, but the execution is exceedingly trite and sloppy.
Unlike most first-rate science fiction, this story is utterly divorced from any sort of political or religious context (it’s ironically being released on Good Friday), not to mention even the faintest emotional resonance (when the film takes a baby step into “Demon Seed” territory by having Depp take control of Clifton Collins Jr. as a romantic surrogate, it instantly pulls back).
Indeed, for a film warning about the future, “Transcendence” seems willfully naive about contemporary realities, asking us to believe it would take the FBI (represented by Cillian Murphy in a truly thankless role) two full years to discover that Hall (whose motivations are murky at best) has spent $38 million to build an enormous data center in the California desert powered by thousands of solar panels.
Wouldn’t the American Medical Association object when cyber-Depp starts curing disabled people on YouTube and turning them into his personal army? Would the FBI and the real Army really join forces with the terrorists who killed Depp to launch an assault on Hall’s compound — and use mortars straight out of a 1950s B-movie instead of, say, drones with smart bombs?
I might not be asking these questions if things weren’t dragging along at a snail’s pace, and Depp were actually playing a mad scientist. Instead, Depp is acting in his increasingly problematic and somnolent “normal person” mode, which is sort of like Keanu Reeves on Quaaludes.
Speaking of Neo, the special effects make those in “The Matrix,” from 15 years ago, look state-of-the-art by comparison.
The whole thing has the generically monotonous look of a TV commercial (unlike, say, the computer-driven “Her”). That’s pretty astonishing, considering this is the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, the brilliant cinematographer behind Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” and Batman movies.
“Transcendence” is the sort of movie that tries to reassure us by having somebody say something like “This is astonishing” roughly every 15 seconds. Believe me, it’s not.
If you want to see a great movie about the dangers of artificial intelligence, check out what is still Steven Spielberg’s best movie of this century, “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” — and skip this transcendentally awful bore.