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| Review by Clay N Ferno |
Johnny Depp stars as Dr. Will Caster in Transcendence, a look at the singularity whereby artificial intelligence progresses to beyond human intelligence.
A self-replicating computer (Depp) attempts to right the wrongs in the world via technological intervention as Evelyn Caster (Rebecca Hall) is caught between helping her husband’s dream come true and her own humanity. Anti-tech rebel Bree (Kate Mera) enlists the help of former Caster colleagues Joseph Tagger (Morgan Freeman) and Max Waters (Paul Bettany) and FBI Agent Buchanan (Cillian Murphy) to shut this whole thing down.
We’re introduced to the Caster couple as they are ready to give a symposium on the benefits of artificial intelligence to a sold out auditorium. A member of the anti-tech contingent, RIFT attempts to assassinate Dr. Caster shortly after the presentation. He is not killed, but poisoned by an isotope that infected his blood stream with radiation poisoning.
Most of this review will unavoidably reveal major plot points, so consider yourself warned.
Caster and his team have designed a supercomputer, named PINN that can communicate via cameras and a slightly-less computery voice than HAL-9000. PINN has the ability to correctly identify people as they enter the room, based on cloud records and government data. PINN becomes the building block and hardware for the inevitable—Caster’s own ‘upload’ to a computer database.
As the radiation tears through Caster’s system, wife Evelyn and partner Max dig up old research where a rhesus monkey was ‘backed up’ to the PINN system. In an attempt to save Caster’s consciousness, he’s strapped into the lab for days, recording every word, syllable, thought and emotion into the PINN mainframe.
When Dr. Will Caster dies in his sleep, the grieving wife and friend turn on the computer, in hopes there will be someone to talk to. Evelyn and Max, after spending the last month of their beloved Will’s life capturing all of his data, at the last minute decide ‘this is wrong’ and are about to wipe the data clean.
This is the first major head scratcher of the film. Why even attempt to back up this person’s consciousness if it is going to be an easy decision to make it go away? What about that last month of Will’s life strapped to diodes instead of walking in the park? Max is oh-so-much calling this an abomination and an evil virus before new Will even boots up!
Just before pulling the plug out of the wall, the computer Will (from now on, Will) asks if anyone is there. Evelyn does a 180, defends Will’s existence as Max storms off, now clearly there are two camps in the world: Evelyn & Will vs. everyone else.
Will connects with the internet, funnels money and resources in Evelyn’s name and then—of course—buys an ENTIRE TOWN in the desert where Will can expand his hardware to a gigantic, solar powered mainframe ten stories down below the Earth. With seemingly limitless semi-trucks of equipment and gear being flown in (remember, new computer Will is rich with resources with just plain regular money somehow- Bitcoin?) to this town, the town adapts around the new desert garden of solar panels, and puts the jobless to work there.
The work and assumptions the audience is asked to participate in with Transcendence is laborious at times. When shows like X-Files or Twilight Zone could create a computer town where everyone works for a master A.I. and it would be exciting, shocking, funny or a combination of all three—Transcendence merely drags you along and reminds you of the concessions you are making at every turn. Transcendence is certainly not fun and misses the dystopian future fantasy melding humans and tech that even the latest RoboCop did a much better job of tackling.
We do get a diluted splash of fun sci-fi when Will heals worker Martin from his server farm, injects him with self-replicating cells, gives him super-strength and connects him to the Will intranet. By creating this hybrid, Will can now use Martin’s body for communicating with and reaching out to his wife Evelyn. Evelyn is freaked out by this surrogate and goes back to having a love/hate for her computer boyfriend.
Will is sweet by recreating their living room in a bunker and having wine served to her, but is really a dick when it comes down to it, you know, by hacking every computer in the world and developing self-healing nanite technology.
Outside of our desert town, Joseph (Freeman) and Agent Buchanan realize the danger this town and Will are becoming and attempt to liberate Evelyn from it. Former A.I. student Bree has sworn off all connected technology, kidnapped Max and eventually links up with Joseph and Buchanan to infiltrate and destroy Will’s compound.
The third act picks up the pace a bit as we find out more about what Will and his nanites are capable of. This is where the actual meat of the story is, and finally some explosions and super-soldiers attacking the army.
Transcendence may be looking to comment on the interconnectivity of people and computers and a possible future, and in some ways it does this very well. Asking the basic questions of ‘is this really the consciousness of a man if uploaded to a database, or are these just reflections and data points of a person’s memories expressed in binary form?’ and ‘can a person love a computer?’ are touched upon. What the story lacks in its attempt to drill into these bigger philosophical questions is a driving motivation to keep us interested in the story or the characters along the way.
Kate Mara as the activist should have been more compelling from the ground up, but there is not really a reason to care about her character or the cause so much.
Fans of Johnny Depp may go crazy for this movie, but will ultimately feel a bit disappointed that he is the voice of the computer, or seen mostly on screen as a talking head as an avatar of his former self.
Ooooh, that sounded unnecessarily mean.
He only appears on screen as an icon of his former character, Dr. Will Caster, not dynamically jumping across a pirate ship or being a dark wide-eyed weirdo.
