Three stars. Rated PG-13, for sci-fi action and violence, brief profanity and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 4.18.14
The White Queen in Lewis
Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass may have been able to believe as many as
six impossible things before breakfast, but smart screenwriters limit
themselves to one.
Meaning, viewers generally are
willing to stretch credibility and accommodate one massive leap of faith per
movie. Transcendence kicks off with an intriguing premise and rather quickly
unveils its fanciful notion. Fair enough: We buy it, for the sake of the
impending drama.
But first-time screenwriter Jack
Paglen doesn’t know when to quit. He piles absurdity atop contrivance, then
gets sloppy with logic, basic human nature and socio-political behavior. By the
third act, you’ll lose track of the glaring plot-holes.
Newbie director Wally Pfister
doesn’t do much to improve the situation; in fact, he makes it worse. While he
deserves credit for drawing compelling performances from his stars, Pfister
also succumbs to the weakness suffered by most cinematographers who insist on
helming a movie: too much reliance on arty scene compositions and camera shots,
and a smothering atmosphere of Great Significance.
Pfister is best known as director
Christopher Nolan’s visual amanuensis: the cameraman behind The Prestige, the
Batman trilogy and most particularly Inception, for which Pfister won an
Academy Award. He has given Transcendence the same labored,
walking-through-glue self-importance that made Inception such a chore to
watch.
Every scene seems to carry an
invisible subtitle: “This is really cool, and very important, so pay close attention.”
Yawn. Wake me when it’s over.
And, as is the case with many
first-time scripters, Paglen’s so-called “original” narrative begs, borrows and
steals from many other, better sources. Avid sci-fi buffs will recognize strong
elements from films such as 1970’s Colossus: The Forbin Project and 1974’s Phase IV, and books such as Greg Bear’s Blood Music and Michael Crichton’s Prey.
Finally, on top of all their
other sins, Paglen and Pfister open their film in the aftermath of horrific
events — thus ruining the suspense they quite easily could have built — and
then flash back five years, to show us how everything went to hell. That’s an
irritating cliché these days, and one that makes sense only if it later turns
out that assumptions derived from said prologue are inaccurate, as a result of
a clever twist.
No clever twists here. Just a long,
slow descent into sci-fi silliness.
We meet computer scientists Will
Caster (Johnny Depp) and his wife, Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), as the former gives a
lecture on his controversial advances in artificial intelligence, to a packed
hall of researchers and hangers-on. The publicity-shy Will is cheered on by
longtime friend Max Waters (Paul Bettany), a neurobiologist who takes a more
cautious approach to the implications of computer sentience.
The conference goes awry when
Will is shot by a crazed member of RIFT — Revolutionary Independence from
Technology — an extremist organization that will stop at nothing to halt
humanity’s ever-increasing dependence on technology. This attack is coordinated
with simultaneous assaults on AI think tanks across the country, including one
headed by veteran computer scientist Joseph Tagger (Morgan Freeman), who
mentored Will, Evelyn and Max as students back in the day, and has continued to
collaborate with them.
Joseph escapes his intended fate;
his research team isn’t as fortunate. And while Will’s injury seems
comparatively minor, his quick slide into ill health reveals that RIFT borrowed
an old KGB trick, by coating the bullet with polonium-210. Will’s death is
guaranteed, and soon.
Evelyn grows frantic, determined
to make the last significant leap that would build on the potentially sentient
computer that Will has designed. Max helps reluctantly, more as a concerned
friend, less (for the moment) as a humanist who worries about where such work
could lead.
Max nonetheless stresses about
the key question: Even if they somehow “find” and digitize everything in Will’s
brain — every thought, every memory, every bit of knowledge — will they be able
to source his soul? To what degree do our often irrational emotions determine intangibles
such as character and integrity?
Filmmakers have explored this
“Some things should be left to God” conundrum ever since James Whale brought
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the big screen in 1931 (and, arguably, even
before that, with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, in 1927). It’s a great subject for
debate, and Transcendence could have remained on firm dramatic footing if
Paglen’s script had gone no further.
But no. RIFT orchestrates another
assault, just as Evelyn unwisely uploads the now-deceased Will’s AI
consciousness to the Internet: a jaw-dropping act of idiocy that foreshadows
even larger whoppers to come. With unlimited funds, thanks to AI-Will’s stock
market manipulations, Evelyn settles in the dying New Mexico desert town of
Brightwood. She then spends the next several years — with AI-Will’s
behind-the-scenes guidance — orchestrating the construction of a massive
underground data center “home” for AI-Will, powered by an equally enormous
solar array that stretches as far as the eye can see.
O-kay. Reality check.
This construction process takes
place without anybody noticing? Seriously? No inquisitive reporters, no
concerned citizens, no suspicious politicians or law-enforcement agents? No
further incursions or revelatory media campaigns by RIFT? For years?
And then, when AI-Will does show
his cards, so to speak, our great nation’s response is limited to — count them
— one FBI agent (Cillian Murphy) and a single military colleague (Cole Hauser)
and his small squad of soldiers?
Um ... really? And never mind the
lack of domestic response; what about the rest of the world?
Later still, when things truly
get bad, Buchanan and Stevens apparently have the on-site authority to
implement a plan that’ll change the entire world as we know it? By their
lonesome widdle selves?
Puh-leaze.
Driving home after enduring this
cinematic disappointment, Constant Companion observed that we’ve grown much
more sophisticated, as patrons of pop culture, in these early years of the 21st
century. Stories need to be smarter; plots must make more sense. We’re no
longer willing to tolerate glaring implausibilities, as we were in the days of
infantile sci-fi melodramas such as TV’s Lost in Space.
Once into its second act, this
story feels as if it had been written by an imaginative but unsophisticated
12-year-old who lacked the maturity to acknowledge real-world issues. Pfister,
Paglen and their stars may present this twaddle with passionate sincerity, but
that doesn’t make the nonsensical pill any easier to swallow.
Depp doesn’t establish much of a
presence as Will. To a degree, this is deliberate; Will is a withdrawn
scientist who prefers work to social activities. But he also has a tender side,
which Depp does convey during the few early, lighter moments with Hall; Will
and Evelyn deeply love each other.
Later, Depp’s quiet, somewhat
emotionless voice becomes quite sinister when it starts coming from endless
banks of computer screens. OK; that’s a suitably creepy touch.
Hall has the toughest challenge,
since Evelyn must be believable both as a thoughtful scientist, and as a
distraught, grief-stricken creature of emotional impulse. Hall walks that fine
line reasonably well at first, but it becomes increasingly difficult to accept
her inability to perceive the consequences of the highly dangerous Pandora’s
Box she has opened.
Asking us to sympathize with a
woman who’s orchestrating the end of mankind — knowingly or unknowingly — is a
tall order. Ultimately, Hall can’t pull that off.
Bettany, a vastly more gifted actor
with a wide emotional range, gives his character much more expressive heft. Max
does understand the potential consequences, but he also is deeply devoted to
his two friends; we sense more than passing fondness for Evelyn, which makes
things even harder on him. Max is by far the story’s most interesting
character, and Bettany does much to forestall our increasing desire to snicker
and roll our eyes.
Kate Mara, a busy television
presence from House of Cards and American Horror Story, is persuasive as
Bree, RIFT’s ruthless leader. Freeman easily nails his role as a seasoned
researcher who, quite sadly, realizes where his work has led. Clifton Collins
Jr. establishes a similarly strong presence as Martin, the Brightwood
construction foreman who’s first to receive AI-Will’s body-enhancing “gifts.”
In contrast, Murphy and Hauser
establish no presence whatsoever as the story’s token cops. They’re
one-dimensional ciphers.
Pfister’s pacing is excessively languid,
the action slowing at times to a crawl. He and cinematographer Jess Hall linger
obsessively on minutia, most notably s-l-o-w-l-y falling drops of water.
Pfister also loves his film’s CGI effects, particularly the means by which
AI-Will “repairs” its various elements. Repeatedly.
At the end of the day, for all of
these high-tech concerns about God, men and machines, Pfister and Paglen’s
biggest crime is boredom. This film is slow, dull and uninvolving. And because
it’s so listless, we’re given even more time to contemplate — and reject — plot
absurdities.
Stay behind the camera, Wally;
you’ve no talent for direction. And Jack, you have no business sitting behind a
keyboard.
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