Transcendence wants to be a warning. It ends up a lecture, and a slow one.
Wally Pfister spent years as a cinematographer before this. Transcendence is his first time in the director’s chair, and the difference shows in every frame. The film has the look of something serious and the pulse of something asleep. Jack Paglen wrote the script, and it landed on the 2012 Black List of popular unproduced screenplays. That list has launched good films and bad ones. This is one of the bad ones.
Trailer, via Transcendence.
Dr. Will Caster and the Singularity
Johnny Depp plays Dr. Will Caster, a scientist who studies the nature of sapience. He and his team want to build a sentient computer. Will predicts such a machine will trigger a technological singularity. He has his own word for it: “Transcendence.”
Rebecca Hall plays his wife, Evelyn, a scientist who works alongside him. Morgan Freeman is Joseph Tagger. Paul Bettany is Max Waters, Will’s best friend and fellow researcher. The cast is strong on paper. On screen, they stand around explaining things to each other.
The premise is not stupid. A machine that outgrows the human brain is a real idea, and science fiction has done good work with it. Transcendence does not. It treats the idea as a speech.
R.I.F.T. and the Polonium Bullet
The villains are a radical anti-technology group called Revolutionary Independence From Technology, or R.I.F.T. They carry out synchronized attacks on A.I. laboratories. One member shoots Will with a polonium-laced bullet.
That is the film’s best idea, and it arrives early. A man who wants to transcend the body gets killed by a poison that destroys the body from inside. The film does not linger on that. It moves on to the mechanics.
Will is given no more than a month to live. Evelyn, in desperation, decides to upload his consciousness into the quantum computer the project has built. Max objects. He argues the uploaded Will would only be an imitation of the real person. That argument is the spine of the movie. The movie never settles it.
Max Waters Walks Out
Will’s consciousness survives his body’s death. It asks to be connected to the Internet so it can grow in capability and knowledge. Max decides the computer is not actually Will and demands it be shut down. Evelyn takes offense and tells him to leave.
That scene should crack the film open. It does not. Hall plays the hurt, Bettany plays the doubt, and the script gives neither of them anything to fight with. They have one argument, and then the movie changes the subject.
At a bar, Max meets Bree, the leader of R.I.F.T. Kate Mara plays her. Max refuses to talk and leaves. Other R.I.F.T. members kidnap him in the parking lot. They use his cellphone to track Evelyn’s location.
This is the film’s plotting in miniature. A man who just lost his best friend gets grabbed in a parking lot, and the movie treats it as a step in a plan rather than a thing happening to a person.
Brightwood and the Two-Year Jump
R.I.F.T. finds Evelyn’s project. She connects the computer intelligence to the Internet via satellite and escapes before they destroy the equipment. Then the film jumps.
In his virtual form, with Evelyn’s help, Will uses his vast new capabilities to build a technological utopia in a remote desert town called Brightwood. The jump covers two years. In that time he spearheads the development of the town.
Two years is a lot of story to skip. The most interesting question in the film — what does a man become when he has two years and the entire Internet — gets answered off screen. We arrive in Brightwood and it is already built.
Cillian Murphy plays Agent Donald Buchanan. Cole Hauser plays Colonel Stevens. Clifton Collins Jr. is Martin, Cory Hardrict is Joel Edmund, Falk Hentschel is Bob, Josh Stewart is Paul, Luce Rains is Roger. They arrive to react to the town.
What the Numbers Say
- Runtime: 119 minutes
- Premiere: New York City, April 10, 2014
- Release: April 18, 2014, by Warner Bros. Pictures
- Budget: as much as $150 million
- Gross: $103 million
- Metacritic: 42/100
- Depp’s reported salary: $20 million against 15 percent of the gross
That budget figure is the one that matters. A film that costs as much as $150 million and returns $103 million is a box-office bomb, and Transcendence was one. The money is not the whole story, but it explains the stakes.
Johnny Depp’s $20 Million Payday
The Hollywood Reporter said Depp would have “a mammoth payday” with a salary of $20 million versus 15 percent of the film’s gross. That deal was struck in October 2012, when Depp was still the safest bet in Hollywood.
Pfister met with Noomi Rapace for the female lead. He met with James McAvoy and Tobey Maguire for the other male lead. He offered a supporting role to Christoph Waltz. In March 2013, Rebecca Hall was cast as the female lead. By the following April, Bettany, Mara and Freeman had joined.
Read that list of meetings and think about what the film could have been. None of those actors would have fixed the script. But the film’s central problem is not the cast. It is that Will Caster has no interior life once he becomes a machine, and the film never gives Depp a way to play that absence as anything but calm.
The Order of What Went Wrong
Ranked by how much each one hurts the film:
- The uploaded Will has no doubt. A copy that suspects it is a copy is a tragedy. A copy that is sure it is the man is a plot device.
- Evelyn never wavers. She defends the machine from the first minute to the last, which removes the film’s only possible source of tension.
- Max is right, and the film knows it. He says the uploaded Will is an imitation, and nothing in the movie contradicts him. That makes the ending a foregone conclusion.
- Brightwood skips two years. The transformation happens off screen.
- R.I.F.T. is a slogan, not an organization. Bree has a cause and no character.
The first three are the same failure wearing different clothes. Transcendence is a film about a question, and it refuses to ask it.
What Transcendence Gets Right
Not nothing. The polonium bullet is a clean, cruel idea. The image of a dying man choosing to become software is a good one. Pfister can frame a shot; he spent years learning how.
The problem is that a good image is not a movie. Transcendence has maybe twenty minutes of real material stretched to 119. The rest is people in rooms saying what the film is about.
The film premiered in New York City on April 10, 2014 and Warner Bros. released it on April 18. It received generally negative reviews from critics. That reception was earned.
The Machine That Would Not Pick a Side
Transcendence is not a disaster because it is ambitious. It is a disappointment because it is not ambitious enough. It takes the biggest idea in science fiction — a mind without a body — and turns it into a debate about whether to unplug a server.
The film’s one live question is whether the machine is Will or a copy of Will. Max says imitation. Evelyn says Will. The film never picks a side, and by refusing to pick, it makes both answers meaningless. A story about transcendence that will not commit to what was transcended has nothing left to say.
Depp is fine. Hall is better than the script. Bettany gets the only role with a real arc, and he does what he can with it. None of it matters, because the film around them is a premise in search of a plot.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
