The mad supercomputer is not a new development in movies (I recently reviewed the dreadful Demon Seed). Nor is the mad scientist. So the trick is what you do with them - do they make sense, first, and can you do something different with them, second. Johnny Depp's new movie Transcendence fails on both points.
If you've seen the trailer you've seen the entire movie. To summarize: a genius computer designer is killed by an anti-technology terrorist group, but before he dies his mind is downloaded to a computer, and then he tries to take over everything and chaos ensues.
Why is he downloaded to a computer? Because his wife loves him and she has not one whit of ethics or even half a brain (despite being a genius herself!). Also, she's aided by another character who we're told, out of the blue shortly after all this, has spent a good portion of his career being one of the technology industry's leading ethicists and a critic of putting the pursuit of newer technology above everything else.
In short, Johnny Depp is downloaded to a computer because people who should know better suddenly get very stupid when the movie needs it of them, and then suddenly get smart only when the movie needs it of them (the ethicist is captured by the terrorists and after being shown a few photos he decides to join their effort, just because the movie needs him to do so at that point). It's bad storytelling, is what it is.
The movie needs to be about the relationship between Johnny Depp and Rebecca Hall (who plays the scientist's wife but is actually the mad scientist of the first act). We need to better understand why she would do things so stupidly and insanely in order to preserve the memory of her husband. But instead we get a moment at the beginning of them planting a garden in their backyard and on that basis alone we're supposed to just accept that this is one of the world's great romances. Give me a damn break. It's a mistake Hollywood repeats time and time again - building a movie around the majesty of a particular relationship, while refusing to put in any of the work needed to make the audience really understand or believe it.
At any rate, after he's downloaded, both the terrorists and the FBI furrow their brows and then we get an hour or so of Depp's character Doing Amazing Things. Which is more or less him building a massive underground laboratory and Johnny Depp on the computer screen repeatedly cooing to Rebecca Hall, "We had a breakthrough last night, I want to show you something." And then we're supposed to marvel at the cheap-looking computer effects that show things like plants coming back to life. Ooooh!
I think the point is that the Depp computer is trying to woo his wife - trying to make her fall in love with him as the computer version, rather than as the memory. Which might make for an interesting movie, if only that was what the filmmakers focused on and were better at conveying. But they have some extra money for effects and bombs, and so they have other things to do.
As most self-aware computers in the movies must do (notable exception: the computer O/S in Her), Depp gets a serious case of megalomania and starts injecting people and the environment with nano-machines that will allow him to control the human race. When Hall sees Depp trying to enslave the human race, she seems to get that it doesn't seem right, but she doesn't leave or do anything to stop it.
Chaos ensues and then at the very end, the movie decides it wants to be the world's greatest romance again so it suggests maybe everything it built up to was not what it was building up to. You can choose to believe that they're trying to raise questions and suggest that there are no easy answers, or you can accept that they're storytelling cowards without the conviction to stick with a characterization so that any of it makes some basic sense.
This is a stupid movie masquerading as one asking Big Questions. It's as brain-dead as its characters and insulting in its lack of commitment to a point or to even having a single character that seems even remotely human. It completely wastes the supposed terrorists (repped by Kate Mara, asked to do nothing but look concerned). There's a suggestion of some nefarious doings by the government (repped here by also-wasted Cillian Murphy), but it goes nowhere. The characters serve only the half-baked plot, so nothing seems believable because the plot doesn't grow out of plausible characterizations.
Director Wally Pfister is Christopher Nolan's cinematographer and so he directs this as an attempt to make it look like it was directed by Nolan. It looks OK, if a bit cheap, but it does absolutely nothing interesting visually with Depp's computer character and is too neutral overall for my tastes. It doesn't matter anyway. It's just a stupid movie.
Screened in the theater.
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