"TRANSCENDENCE" - THE FILM THAT JUST DOESN'T...

I used to be such a big fan of Johnny Depp. No, I really was. I remember the excitement welling up in me when I saw the second pirates of the Caribbean. Jack Sparrow was atop a mast of a small dingy, you saw him from behind and... A proper “squeeee” moment. One  has to say, the veteran actor’s looks have not dimmed at all with age. But as for his output… It’s definitely a series of “oh dear” moments. The latest film critics love to hate being Mordecai – no one seemed to have a single good word to say about it. He seems to have quite a few films coming out this year, let’s hope one of them is the film to relaunch the Johnny Depp we remember and love from classics like Edward Scissorhands or – a particular favourite of mine – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In the meanwhile, this week we peruse the latest booty from my trip to the DVD store – a little number called Transcendence.

Sporting a cast absolutely chock-full of stars – Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, Rebecca Hall and Kate Mara – and a first-time, though passionate director who had Dp’d on many films before, Transcendence looked more than promising. The subject matter was current and thought-provoking too, as it explores the domain of AI (one of a long series of films to recently ask questions on the matter) and in particular – as the name suggests – Transcendence. It’s a weird one. You can see promise and lots of “good things” bubbling right beneath the surface, but when all is said and done the film just doesn’t…  You know, it just doesn’t.

Dr Will Caster (Johhny Depp) and his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) are scientists at the cutting edge of AI, they are working on creating a sentient machine. Will would much rather tinker about in his laboratory with no contact with the outside world at all but anti-AI activists has other plans.  An attempt on Will’s life pushes the team’s hand to attempting Transcendence, that is to say, uploading Will’s consciousness onto a computer. The attempt is successful and what seems to be painfully similar to Will’s spirit now resides in a computer. And the moment the computer connects to the internet truly extraordinary things begin to happen. For Will, the sky is literally the limit… The question is, what does this mean for the rest of the planet…

There were several problems with this film as far as I was concerned. First of all, the characters seemed unfinished. Of course there are a “set” lot of characters in every story and a little bit of digging reveals them for the tropes they are. The key in that case is in the digging. A combination of the actor’s performance and the director’s vision make the characters complex and we don’t just yawn and go “mentor” or “turncoat”. In this film, the actors performances are good – but I suspect they were just doing what was being asked of them, which, sadly, was not enough for my money. I was particularly disturbed by the fact that the two main female characters (heck the only two actual female characters in the film) were the worst when it came to being caricaturised. Both Evelyn – Will’s wife (though credit where it’s due, she is a scientist so at least credited with intelligence) and the leader of the rebels Bree (Kate Mara – again at least in a leader’s position) are by and large portrayed as “excitable women” acting on their emotions, making mistakes and being “guided” by men. Morgan Freeman is the typical older mentor, Paul Bettany is the “sceptic”, Cillian Murphy is “the cop”. All the characters are perfectly executed but that is what you would expect from a veteran cast. Things could definitely have been made interesting through performance alone – and an opportunity was missed…

The bit things were “added to” was the storyline. And oh boy, did they add “things” to that. When you take a gander at the extra features you see a clue as to what went wrong – “It’s a sci-fi film” say the crew members, “so the film definitely has a fiction and fantasy element”. Well of course it does.  Basically the film has taken the much disputed concept of transcendence – the uploading of the human consciousness onto a computer system and – coupled with the developments that would allow us to have –in theory at least – artificial bodies thus leading to immortality for all intents and purposes. Some scientific centres claim that all of this could be a mere and unbelievable 30 years away. Others aren’t quite as optimistic.

What the film tries to do is to give us a terrifying hint at what could happen if this Transcendence somehow “got out of control” and “took over the world”.  Apart from the fact that the whole concept stinks of The Terminator,  the film simply does not do enough to instil this fear into us. What it does do is at best hard to follow and very loosely based in logic (for those who have seen the film, I credit myself with at least average intelligence and good education but I am still at a loss as to how Will can actually manipulate the gravel and the concrete in the town around him). The film should have either leant a bit more on the plotlines that were actually laid out within the domain of logic, or gone a bit more spectacular on the “fantastic” elements and made more of a spectacle of them. I mean I get it, they are trying to go understated and hint at the horrors to come but with the cast performances already reduced to clichés and none of the storylines quite followed through the film just… Doesn’t. By the time you go “Ok fine, I officially suspend disbelief, he can manipulate nature via wifi or whatever” the film is done. You just don’t have the opportunity to “settle into” anything.

 I have a feeling that our first time director Wally Pfister just had so much he wanted to do with his first feature that he just crammed it all into the same film on a superficial level and explored none of them in depth. I do wish he had picked a few concepts and burrowed down instead of across. It could have been a fascinating film… It ends up being just.. Meh…