Transcendence
IF I may be permitted a vulgarity, Johnny Depp has lost his shit. Since the delirious heights of his thespian psychosis as Jack Sparrow, he has become a walking vortex of self-references, each character he plays a pastiche of past personalities: the smiling half-sneers, the drunken lope, and the agitated speech patterns of offbeat genius. He has cultivated a bohemian aura that promises if he doesn’t have a dreamcatcher dripping from his pirate tangle of dreadlocks, you’ll find one romantically smeared somewhere into the plot.
So, our mid-life crisis Peter Pan is a disastrous casting choice for Transcendence, where he plays Will Caster, an artificial intelligence researcher with owl-eye spectacles and hair swerving into a voguish mad-scientist mop. Transcendence is another cautionary thriller in the sagas of dystopian sci-fi, a film which — along the way hinting at Frankenstein, Adam and Eve, Icarus and Alan Turing, and a range of undergraduate philosophical inquiries — grapples with the terrors of a technology which exceeds humanity’s grasp.
It seems that the millenarian anxieties around Y2K have matured into a subject of fascination for the cinema of 21st-century science fiction, much of which gravitates around the shadow side of technological progress. “I love the way you wrestle with technology’s promise and its peril,” an admirer says to Caster. Of course, no one speaks this pretentiously unless they have a croissant lodged in an uncomfortable recess, but this line, with its sound-bite simplicity, suggests the lack of depth the film brings to its dialogue and narrative possibilities. The film may brush up against exciting possibilities of future apocalypse, but its greatest threat is an intelligent audience, and so the plot dodges logic with samurai talent.
It is Caster’s wife and co-conspirator, Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), who is most strongly seduced by the tech- no-fantasies of neoliberal dogma, arguing that “artificial machines” could end up curing cancer and poverty, rescuing humanity from its own self-annihilation.
So an ambiguous messianic faith is placed in technological advance, displacing the problems of capitalism into the solutions of a god-like technology. It is by turning its eyes from the pressure of real-world dramas that films like Transcendence end up offering little more than fast-food for thought, and foreclose the kind of introspection US science fiction should be performing.
At any rate, Dr Caster is attacked by a group of retro-terrorists, radicals of nostalgia who believe artificial sentience is an affront to nature. Minutes before the plutonium bullet manages to kill him off, his wife uploads his consciousness into a supercomputer and, before long, Caster is an ethereal god-in-the-ma- chine with a dangerous agenda for the human race. Mostly, this is a prelude to a third act which bursts with meaningless violence.
Director Wally Pfister is renowned for his masterful cinematography on many of Christopher Nolan’s most mature thrillers, including The Dark Knight Rises. But here, the gleaming symmetries and mirrored complexes he conjures seem second-rate. It doesn’t help that Depp’s most radical move as an actor is to have his hair shaved off, stripping him of the boyish capital he relies upon to charm a fanbase plumped up on Tim Burton movies.
Transcendence is a disappointing trawl through the modern anxieties of a technocratic planet. Spike Jonze’s Her is its infinite superior in exploring the troubling mortal pressures of a brave new world. LS Kavish.chetty@gmail.com @kavishchetty