We all live in two worlds. The physical world of sounds and sights and smells, and the digital world of the internet. Transcendence is about a dying guy uploading his mind onto a machine, to move entirely from the physical to the digital world. It's an entertaining idea, and is vaguely relevant to science today as Artificial Intelligence is improving.
However, the film suffers from the widely held but annoying idea that there is a nice dividing line between being a dumb machine (Skynet before 2:14 am) and being sentient (Skynet after 2:14 am). There's a thought provoking bit where a machine is challenged to prove it's self aware, and gives a killer comeback that humans also can't prove they're self aware. I think as science improves actually we will realise that there is no threshold to cross, just increasingly complex computers which are more and more capable of 'human intuition' and making 'the mistakes that make us human'.
But back to the film. Johnny Depp plays the main scruffy scientist, and Paul Bettany is in good stooping stuttery form as his genius pal. Rebecca Hall is less convincing as a scientist, and more convincing at looking like Scarlett Johansson.
Early on there's a science demonstration with lots of weird equations and graphs spinning round behind each speaker, which probably means they thought what they were saying was too boring. The director, Wally Pfister, is a Cinematographer who worked on some Christopher Nolan films. I knew this already and maybe it influenced me, but it certainly seemed like a lot of time was spent on establishing shots and visual cues. Science scenes begin with lots of computers, when the FBI are tired they carry big cups of coffee, and terrorists unnecessarily dye their hair blonde.
It's an interesting journey seeing Johnny Depp uploaded. It's not clear how much of the sentient face on the monitor is really Johnny (human and compassionate), and how much is the basic computer program they mixed in (cold, calculating and evil). The wife believes it's definitely really him, but she's bound to say that. There's also a subplot of neo-Luddites trying shut him down, and possibly a hint of a love triangle. That would all be enough for me, but unfortunately there's loads more plot thrown in now and the film really goes downhill.
Having made the transcendence from physical to digital, Cyber-Johnny then makes the transition back to physical. I expect this is because the film-makers didn't want just a cerebral internet-enemy, they wanted more of an action film with some real physical baddies. This transition back to physical consists of creating an army of zombies and some ridiculous nanobots. I didn't like the nanobots at all.
Another complaint - in the first half of the film it's clearly established that Cyber-Johnny is trying to connect to the internet, and will link in every connected device. The film then forgets this rule, and before long he can simply control anything electric, even if it's not a networked device. At this point the neo-Luddites start reading books by candle light.
In the bizarre finale Johnny releases his nanobots across the whole world, and they are even seen swimming in the water and replicating. I don't understand how/why this is cured by Paul Bettany releasing a virus and shutting down the internet. The purpose of shutting down the internet seems only to be able to finish with a post-apocolyptic world with no electricity, which is portrayed as actually quite nice. I think this shows the film coming down on the side of 'computers are bad', and indeed Paul Bettany mutters some guff about the human spirit.
It's better than Robocop but worse than everything else I've seen this year. Afterwards I planned to watch Pompeii but couldn't face it.
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