If you haven’t heard of Wally Pfister, we really don’t know how exactly we can help with that. Pfister is one of the all-time great cinematographers and one of Christopher Nolan’s right hand men for most of his projects, working on the likes of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception among others. How beautiful you remember any of those films look is down to the work of this genius, Pfister was certainly in a league of his own when it came to cinematogrpahy, so much so that Nolan was devastated to see him leave and carve out a career for himself.
However, when the rumours began about Transcendence there were more than a few eager beavers excited about this particular project. Going head to head with Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar this year, Transcendence was setting itself up as one of the biggest films of this year. With a budget of $100 million and with the vision that is Pfister, surely we were in for a cinematic treat. Nolan can rest easy, that was never meant to be.
Starring Johnny Depp as Doctor Will Caster, the film tells the story of a brilliant visionary who is working on technology that is self-aware with the view of curing illnesses and generally making the world a better place. While his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) wants to fix things, Caster just wants to understand how things work. However, not everyone is as excited about the ideas that Caster holds for the future and a group that want to stop the technology takeover decide they are going to take out the problem.
With Caster slowly dying, his two fellow researchers, Evelyn and Max (Paul Bettany) decide they are going to help him complete his life work and give him the ability to “transcend”, basically copying his memories and mind to a computer which will operate by itself, keeping not only Caster’s brain alive but his life’s work. But not everything is as straightforward as it seems. Although the pair do their best to keep control over Caster, the computer begins operating independently, recruiting soldiers to its cause and slowly becoming far more of a problem than they ever could have imagined.
Yes, all of the above sounds intriguing and during these times with our over-dependence on technology, it is certainly more than topical, but Transcendence‘s main problem is that the main idea exists and that is all. Much like the computer operating system it depicts, it spins out of control, becoming increasingly more nonsensical the further into the running time we go. The actors utter lines that we can only assume they were embarrassed to read aloud. Cillian Murphy suffers this on not one, but two occasions.
The cast as a whole try to make the most of a bad situation but there is no denying that Johnny Depp’s career certainly needs some kind of resuscitation, perhaps a career kick he thought he might get with this particular project. Sadly, that is just not the case. Depp barely figures himself for most of the film, he exists mainly as the machine. The rest of the cast are fine, but just that, fine. Hall has proved on many an occasion that she is worth far more than a project like this while Bettany just looks like he may never get a break again.
Besides the bad points, of which there are many, in fact you may begin to wonder why you ever bought the cinema ticket, there is one plus; the film looks beautiful, even the machine takeover towards the end somehow looks kind of inviting, almost like a really nice hospital. However, you are not paying good money to admire how good a film looks.
Don’t waste your money, this is just a mess. A mess.
