In Hollywood, the phrase "science fiction film" doesn't usually

mean what it should. Most films sold with that designation

aren't true science fiction, because they don't deal in ideas in a
sustained, conscientious way; they don't extrapolate where we
are and where we might be headed, and what it might mean
for the human race intellectually, physically and emotionally.
More often what you get are action or horror or superhero
movies with a faint science fiction flavor—films that
occasionally remind themselves to genuflect toward big
themes when they aren't just having the characters run and
jump and dodge explosions or be surprised by a monster
lunging at them from the dark. "Transcendence," about a
dying computer genius (Johnny Depp) who uploads himself in
computerized form and achieves a problematic digital
afterlife, is real science fiction. It explores its ideas with
sincerity, curiosity and terrifying beauty (its director is Wally
Pfister, longtime cinematographer for Christopher Nolan).
This makes its failures all the more depressing. A bad film is
just a bad film. A well-intentioned film that reaches for
greatness and keeps falling on its face is some kind of minor
tragedy.
How much do you want to know about the plot? Since a big
part of the film's fascination lies in its unexpected storytelling
rhythms, I'll try to restrict myself to elements already divulged
in the trailer, even though I resented where the story ended
up. Suffice to say that when the tale begins, Depp's character,
a Steven Jobs-ian technology guru named Will Caster, has
been at the vanguard of artificial intelligence research for
some time. He and his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall of "Iron Man
3") have been trying to create a sentient machine with a
personality, perhaps a digital facsimile of a soul, even going so
far as to hook a prototype version up to a dying monkey and
upload the contents of its brain. Next step: do it with a human.
A terrorist organization headed by Kate Mara's Bree engineers
a series of strikes against research labs to set the AI research
back. They think that creating an omnipotent computer with a
human personality is a bad idea. Imagine!

Caster is wounded in the 9/11 style, multi-pronged attack,

taking a radiation-laced bullet and dying a few weeks later.
And it's at this point—maybe a quarter of the way through the
story—that "Trancendence" becomes intriguing. What we've
got here isn't just a "Frankenstein"-like parable of scientific
hubris run amok, but also the story of a grieving spouse who's
reluctant to let go of her mate and tries to prolong his life
artificially. The film's script, credited to Jack Paglen, takes its
sweet time confirming whether the being uploaded into the
neural network Will Caster or merely a digital copy, and if a
copy, what sort.
Will, after all, did not upload himself, and as we all know,
when a physical object is destroyed and then reassembled in
some other form, it might retain the essence of the original
thing, but it is not the same—and its shape and function might
be altered, even tainted, by the expectations and agendas of
whoever did the reconstructing, as well as by the means of
reassembly and the materials used. You may be reminded of
the end of Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick's "A.I.",
which distinguishes between an actual person and an idealized
image of that person. You might also recall W.W. Jacob's short
story "The Monkey's Paw."

As the real world merges with the virtual world, will reality
become a mere adjunct of the virtual? Are the digital selves we
create online truly extensions of us, or do they eventually take
on lives of their own? The "Matrix" films, Spike Jonze's "Her"
and many other science fiction movies addressed these
questions; they're never far from this one's mind, and even
when the film fails as drama, it keeps the imagination
spinning. Will asks Evelyn to help him refurbish a dying
desert town called Brightwood into a research facility that is to
develop nanotechnology (machines as small as molecules) to
repair and even replace flesh and alter nature. But is it really
Will who's doing the asking? When we first meet him, he's a
remote and in some ways inscrutable person (Depp's too-
reticent performance makes him rather dull, actually), but
post-digital conversion he becomes more controlling, building
a love nest in which he constantly observes his beloved from
computer screens as she pines for him, dines by candlelight,
and sleeps.
"Are we sure it's him?" asks Will's best friend Max (Paul
Bettany). "Clearly his mind has evolved so rapidly that I'm not
sure it matters anymore," replies another computer genius,
Tagger (Morgan Freeman), who fears something horrible is
taking shape in the desert. Government forces, including an
FBI agent played by Cillian Murphy, were originally allied
against the terrorists, but now they're starting to wonder if
they were on the wrong side. Brightwood is quite literally a
god complex, headquarters for the puppet master Will. He
posthumously manipulates reality from the protection of a
cyberspace that might as well be his own personal Heaven.
The script is filled with Biblical allusions, some heavy-handed,
others sly. It seems no accident that Brightwood, the place
where miracles and seeming plagues occur, is located in the
desert, or that the first three letters of Will's wife's name are
identical to that of the character who ate the fruit of the Tree
of Knowledge in the Book of Genesis. Pfister has thought the
story out in terms of resonant images, some of which recur at
key points in the story. Nourishing raindrops hide sinister
secrets. Nano-bots swarm upward in black clouds like the
locusts in "Days of Heaven." The in medias res beginning
takes place in a garden where something miraculous has
occurred. Scenes start or end with fades to white, as if alluding
to four of the most famous words in the Old Testament: "Let
there be light."

The landscape keeps being destroyed and reassembled,

driving home the notion that as humankind evolves into a
machine-human hybrid, all reality will become virtual, as easy
to create, alter or erase as data on a hard drive. There's a
constant undertone of anxiety about the possibility that
human flesh is becoming as outdated as last year's iPhone.
There's a longing for what Seth Brundle, the Frankenstein-like
hero of David Cronenberg's "The Fly", called "the poetry of
steak"—that intangible, miraculous something that makes
humanity human.

If only "Transcendence" could get a handle on its attitude

toward all of this. It's fine to want to explore and just sort of
kick ideas around. Too often, though, the movie doesn't feel
ambiguous or complicated, merely muddled and wishy-washy.
It doesn't want to make Will, or Will 2.0, into a flat-out bad
guy, a threat that has to be neutralized, and it doesn't want to
scapegoat Evelyn, either, even though she's responsible for the
digital re-creation of Will and seems to have a touch of Dr.
Frankenstein herself. (This movie could have been called
"Bride of Frankenstein," as in "The Doctor's Wife.")
The movie wants to warn us about the perils of playing God
and of technological overreach, and it wants to concentrate
those fears in one or two people for the sake of dramatic
conflict; but by making this choice, it ignores the fact that in
life, it's not one or two brilliant, irresponsible people actively
doing things that eradicate privacy and alter reality: it's a sort
of passive acceptance that eventually becomes adaptation, or
evolution. Other people don't re-wire our brains, it just
happens as we live more of our lives online. The problem isn't
that some disturbed individuals want to turn us into machines
against our will (ahem), it's that we don't have enough will to
resist becoming more machinelike. We're slaves to
convenience. Yes, you too. Just look at you right now, reading
this on your computer, or your handheld phone, maybe in
bed.
The most galling thing about "Transcendence," though, isn't
its inability to get a handle on what, if anything, it wants to say
about the enormous changes happening to the human race,
it's the movie's ending, which seems calculated to reassure us
that everything's going to be fine as long as the right people
are in charge, especially if they're good looking. It's precisely
that sort of blind acceptance of authority that got the world of
"Transcendence" into a big mess in the first place, and that
could bring this world, this "real" world, to ruin as well.

Welcome to Berkeley, California, in the near future where the fallout

from a crash between humankind and technology has left the city in
shambles with no Internet, cell phones, or other essentials of the digital
world everyone took for granted. We are shocked to see a computer
keyboard used to keep a door open.

The narrator Max (Paul Bettany) takes us to a period five years earlier
where he was a trusted member of a team of scientists working on a
sentient machine called PINN (Physically Independent Neural Network).
The project caught the eye of the government even though Dr. Will
Caster (Johnny Depp), the chief scientist behind this A.I. (artificial
intelligence) experiment wants to maintain the freedom he and his wife
and fellow researcher Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) have had to go their own
way without bureaucratic interference.
These very bright scientists believe they are working with an
evolutionary advance in human consciousness. At a fundraiser, Evelyn
talks about changing the world, and Will describes the means: "Imagine a
machine with the full range of human emotion. Its analytical power will
be greater than the collective intelligence of every person in the history
of the world. Some scientists refer to this as the singularity. I call it
transcendence."

Not everyone shares their optimism. A radical group that calls itself RIFT
(Revolutionary Independence from Technology), led by Bree (Kate Mara)
is willing to use violence to stop what they see as a brave new world of
mind control and oppression. One of their number asks Will whether
he's acting like god by advancing the cause of Artificial Intelligence. The
scientist responds: "Isn't that what man has always done?" The Luddites
blow up a lab, killing some researchers and then shoot Will.

Although the scientist only suffers a surface wound, doctors discover

that the bullet was coated with radiation and he only has a few weeks to
live. In a battle against time, Evelyn and Max seek to upload all the data
in his mind to PINN so that what he knows and all its potential is not lost.

This ambitious science fiction film is directed by Wally Pfister, the

longtime cinematographer of Christopher Nolan, and written by Jack
Paglen. There have been quite a number of movies dealing with the
negative fallout from cyborgs including 2001, Demon Seed, The Net,
and Virtuosity. More recently, Spike Jonze's Her explored a man's
relationship with a computer operating system, somewhat similar to
what Evelyn tries to do in this film. But Transcendence cannot hold a
candle to that Academy Award nominee.

Still, it does merit attention as a cautionary tale about scientific hubris in

the information age. Some of the developments in the second half of
this thriller are worth thinking about: Evelyn's willingness to follow the
instructions of a digital representation of her husband; an older
colleague's (Morgan Freeman) view that the super-intelligent computer
that can heal people and give them amazing new powers is malevolent;
and the struggle that takes place in Evelyn whose emotions reveal her
love for Will in his new form but whose reason cannot accept his control
over her and his "hybrids," the locals he has healed.

Without Rebecca Hall's heartfelt and nuanced performance this science

fiction thriller would have no soul. Her choice, at the end
of Transcendence is truly redemptive.

Special features on the Blu-Ray/DVD include What is Transcendence?:

the concept of "transcendence" is discussed by cast and filmmakers as
we look inside the film's exploration of Artificial Intellignece and the
Singularity; Wally Pfister: A Singular Vision: step inside the creative
process of visionary director Wally Pfister to see how he juggles the
dazzling, technologically advanced visuals along with guiding the cast
through their intense character arcs; Guarding the Threat: join the
debate on the benefits and dangers of "transcendence"; The Promise of
A.I.: learn about the amazing potential of A.I. from scientists and the
filmmakers; Viral Videos: It's Me; Singularity; R.I.F.T.