Expand Partners The Amazing Spider-Man 2 - In Theaters May 2 Expand Partners
Knights of Badassdom
Transcendence

Transcendence

Movie
Director(s): 
Genre: 
In Theatres: 
Apr 18, 2014
Grade:
D
Running Time: 
119 minutes

As society’s understanding of technology increases, so does our ability to shorten the gap that separates man and machine. Soon, the question isn’t “What if we could build a sentient AI with collective intelligence” but rather should we? Transcendence attempts to answer this thought-provoking question but does so in a manner that is neither intelligent nor entertaining. In essence, it transcends nothing.

Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is one of the leading experts studying artificial intelligence and is on the brink of developing a sentient AI that can think and evolve on its own. While most people consider his scientific findings to be helpful to mankind, a group of extremists known as R.I.F.T. believe in a technology free world and will go to any means to achieve it. While presenting a speech on his latest breakthrough, Dr. Caster is shot by a R.I.F.T. member and fatally wounded. With not much time left to live, he decides to merge his mind with a machine by uploading his brain into an artificial intelligence program he has been developing. When the transfer is a success, Will immediately begins acquiring knowledge from the internet and expanding his power supply, becoming near unstoppable. Fearful that Will is no longer the person he used to be, his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and fellow researcher/friend Max (Paul Bettany), struggle to find a way to stop him before he takes over the world, one computer at a time.

Transcendence opens with an unnecessary epilogue scene that pretty much informs you how the film will end. The world has reverted back into a technology-less era and Max recalls the story of how things came to be over the course of the past five years. It’s a seemingly pointless intro that does nothing but throw a wrench into the film from the start. Knowing how it will all end doesn’t make the journey any more interesting and, if anything, hinders the film.

It’s Will’s journey from human to AI that is the focus of the film and the ethical choices that go hand-in-hand with it. The problem with that is that there isn’t enough backstory about Will and his wife Evelyn to really make audiences care about either character. Almost immediately at the start of the film Will is shot and reduced to lines of code. There’s no time to grasp who Will was as a person and because of that, you don’t really care who he is as an AI. With a film so focused on telling a story about the merger of man and machine, it completely ignores the man part. As a result, we get a simplified and almost action-less story about how technology will take over our world.

At its core, Transcendence presents an interesting concept but absolutely fails on its delivery. The film is a boring and lifeless shell that looks pretty on screen but struggles at telling an interesting story.

Matt Rodriguez
Review by Matt Rodriguez
Follow him @ Twitter
Friend him @ Facebook