Transcendence: Clunky fare

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Transcendence: Clunky fare

Transcendence like a paranoid TED talk, says Jake Coyle

By (AP)

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Published: Sun 20 Apr 2014, 11:58 AM

Last updated: Fri 3 Apr 2015, 6:27 PM

Hal has come a long way. First, we had Scarlett Johansson as a human-like operating system. Now, Johnny Depp has been uploaded. If the singularity — when artificial intelligence surpasses human smarts — is indeed coming, at least it has decent taste in movie star avatars.

First-time director Wally Pfister’s Transcendence isn’t so much the “Him” to Spike Jonze’s Her as it’s a more dystopian vision of the meeting of human consciousness and computer intelligence. It turns out that when computers get sophisticated, worse things can happen than Joaquin Phoenix getting his feelings hurt.

But whereas Her was playful and personal about familiar futuristic concepts, Transcendence is clunky and lifeless. It’s like the movie version of a paranoid TED talk.

In the early scenes of Transcendence, Dr. Will Caster (a disappointingly sleepy Depp) is a TED-style master of the universe, speaking confidently in front of large video screens to eager listeners about neurology and artificial intelligence. But there are also protesters to his potentially all-powerful invention: the Physically Independent Neural Network (PINN), an early artificial intelligence propelled by a room full of computers that Caster believes could, among other things, cure cancer.

An assassination attempt with a radiation-laced bullet leaves Caster with weeks to live. Desperate to keep his mind alive, his loyal, sycophantic wife and fellow researcher Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) uploads Caster’s brain to a PC with PINN hardware. Helping her is their good friend and colleague Max (Paul Bettany, serving as narrator).

But as anyone with an iPhone knows, software updates can be tragic. The transfer is finished just as Caster dies. Soon enough, the screen flickers to life, first with a few typed words and then seemingly Caster’s full personality, in voice and pixel form.

Alert to their plan, anti-tech activists (led by Kate Mara) are simultaneously descending. Max begins to realise they’ve created a high-speed Frankenstein in Caster, who spreads across the Web and begins seeking more computing power.

It takes a long time for Transcendence to build to this moment, when perhaps it should have begun here in the first place. But it feels like a suddenly intriguing crossroads. Where will this terrifyingly digital Depp go?

The film feels sincerely animated by the frightful questions it poses about computing power and interconnectedness. But Pfister, making his directorial debut after years as a cinematographer often teamed with director Christopher Nolan (a Transcendence producer), doesn’t exhibit a sure hand with dialogue or a feel for the rhythm of his narrative. Neither does the film have the distinctive form of his prior photography work, most notably The Dark Knight.


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