Transcendence

One film I'm really waiting for this year is Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's thought-provoking sci-fi about a wormhole to another universe. What's on the other side?

In the meantime, we can all see Nolan's (executive) producing skills at work in another thought-provoking sci-fi film, Transcendence, which sees the directorial debut of his long-time cinematographer, Wally Pfister.

Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) and his wife, Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) create PINN, a really-advanced supercomputer. Their goal with it is to make it smarter than everyone ever, or as they call it, Transcendence. Nobody, however, bothered to inform them that an anti-technology terrorist organization called RIFT is lurking about. Which makes it easy for a RIFT representative to shoot Will with a radiation bullet.

(What? Were they too good for normal bullets?!)

Now that Will is dying a slow, painful death, Evelyn decides to save him by uploading his consciousness into PINN. Digital Will has Evelyn connect him to the World Wide Web to expand his influence. End result: They take over a small town and attract test-subjects for their healing, individuality-robbing nanobots. It's up to RIFT, of all organizations, and the Casters' former partner, Max (Paul Bettany), to stop them.

This film has a lot of ideas about advancing technology. The only thing I got out of it was, "It's not nice to make people into a hive mind! Even if it is to heal them from things!"

The rest of the ideas are somewhere in a 119 minute film that's dull and overlong. You realize both problems the moment you realize Will was shot with a radiation bullet. A weapon that slowly kills. A real bullet could've saved RIFT, and the audience, a lot of time. Afterwards, things move along so slowly that you'll surely check your clocks more than once.

RIFT also goes from a terrorist organization to the "good guys." Sorry, but they weren't interesting good guys. Or even that good.

Transcendence falls flat in its goal to give its audience some intellectual sci-fi. The only question the audience will get from this is "what?" If anything, this makes me want to see Interstellar even more; expect that review when it comes out in November.