Transcendence is a science fiction story, but it's very much about faith. Early on, a member of a "neo-Luddite" group confronts Will Caster (Johnny Depp) about his work. Caster is promising a future in which a massive artificial intelligence will contain more knowledge than the world has ever collectively possessed, and the man – played by Lukas Haas, whom many of us first saw as a tiny Amish child in Witness, where he was also counseled about the dangers of modernity and technology – accuses him of trying to create a god. "Isn't that what mankind has always done?" Caster volleys back.
The story is basically this: Johnny Depp plays Caster, a genius researcher who, faced with a failing body, has his consciousness uploaded to a supercomputer by his desperate wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and best friend Max (Paul Bettany). Can you reproduce a human soul with a machine? Should you tinker with the work of creation? Whether you think of these questions as hackneyed or eternal – or both – may dictate how much you care about the story.
For all the reasons explained in Ian Buckwalter's review, the film doesn't really work. The story doesn't make any sense – not in the "E.T. shouldn't be able to make a bike fly" kind of way, but in the "lacks internal cohesion" kind of way. There is a tantalizing moment when a particularly menacing shot of Hall shot across the top of a monitor suggests that Transcendence is about to embrace a more intriguing direction and become a horror film, but it doesn't. It insists upon a path that's far less interesting than outright horror would have been, and muddles itself in the process.
It's a fundamentally silly movie, but the flip side is that it's extraordinarily pretty, and it's an opportunity to see what a very thoughtful director does with visuals in a story about science and nature, man and God.
There was good reason to suspect Transcendence would look good. Wally Pfister, the director, is best known as a cinematographer who won an Oscar for Inception. It was one of seven Christopher Nolan films he's worked on since 2000, including Nolan's Batman trilogy and Memento. It was unlikely to be ugly. It was even more unlikely to be poorly thought out visually, even though it precisely seems poorly thought out as a story.
What's most noticeable on the surface – it's obvious even in something as short as the trailer – is Pfister's love of corridors. Not only is the lab where much of the sketchy science takes place a maze of long, shiny, sterile white corridors down which the camera is constantly gazing, but the racks that hold Will's supercomputer constitute a reverse version – the same setup, only in black. Want more? An outside array of solar panels with a path down the middle creates the same effect, as does a series of stone arches through which Bettany at one point approaches the camera.
The Many Corridors Of Wally Pfister
Please enjoy some of the many corridors of Transcendence, taken from stills as well as trailer screenshots. You'll see what I mean.