As Dr. Will Caster works toward his goal of creating an omniscient, sentient machine, a radical anti-technology organization fights to prevent him from establishing a world where computers can transcend the abilities of the human brain.  imdb 

Well, I saw Transcendence.

My first comment afterwards was to be thankful I didn’t have to review it. Then I ran out of time to see another film so … well, damn.

It is not a bad film, it is a science based sci-fi story, which I love, but I didn’t love it. Not a bit. I didn’t hate it either – I just didn’t care enough either way.

I was mildly entertained but largely underwhelmed.

It looks good, really good – and so it should because the director, Wally Pfister, has worked on TV and film projects for years. He has spent the last ten or so years as Christopher Nolan’s director of photography.

However, he has directed just one feature, this one. Which proves that a good director is much more than a talented eye looking through the lens. He has to hold the veracity of the story and subplots together, and more importantly, never lose the page in his head.

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It seemed to me like the leads were told to play their role as different people, no doubt hoping this would confuse the audience and keep us guessing about the goodies / baddies / point of the film. It didn’t. It just came across as bad acting. Some of the supporting roles make no sense at all and cannot have been shot in sequence (you are a thought controlled zombie clone of the computer – no, wait … that was yesterday, or tomorrow).

The story, by Jack Paglen (who?) is a mad patchwork of ideas and events that are way too complex to skim over but way too time consuming to make good celluloid. If this were a teen film it would not be a trilogy, it would be at least a quilogy! By the end of which at least some of the leads might have developed enough affection for the project to at least attempt to act.

Pfister seems to have called in a lot of favours to get a big chunk of Nolan’s acting regulars into his movie (who knows, they might owe him money) but he does not utilize them at all. Morgan Freeman’s highlight? He passes the girl a note. Nelson Mandela does not pass notes, damn it. I don’t know what the direction given to Rebecca Hall’s scientist/wife was but I suspect it was ‘in this scene your mouth is open … in this scene it’s closed’. Kate Mara plays a plank of wood and Cillian Murphy is unconscionably squandered as the cop.

The only person actually giving their role heaps is Paul Bettany, the only discernably human human being. When the computer has more emotional range than the humans we don’t need to wait for the A.I. revolution, it’s here.

What is really frustrating though is that this could have been worthwhile cinema. Really good, paranoid sci-fi. With a ruthless editor, an OCD continuity person and a very, very pared back script it could have been something.

But not like this.

I love Johnny Depp. Always have. Always will. I did not love him in this film and that makes me sad. He needed to establish his charismatic boffin who wants a simple life quickly and convincingly before the bullets start flying. However it seems that the writer and director should have had more meetings and actually established for themselves who each character was before they started shooting. They should have decided which film of the three or more stuffed into this one they wanted to make and stuck with that.

It feels like the first, really rough draft of a good film, not like the finished product worthy of the acting talent Pfister had at his fingertips.