Film Review: Hi-tech wreck puts 'sigh' in sci-fi

30 May 2014 - 02:30 By Tymon Smith
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HAL OF A GUY: Johnny Depp in 'Transcendence'
HAL OF A GUY: Johnny Depp in 'Transcendence'

Best known for his work with director Christopher Nolan, cinematographer Wally Pfister's directorial debut is a messy, not particularly impressive futuristic techno fable that features performances flatter than a salt pan and a script that makes about as much sense as a David Icke book.

It's the kind of film that constantly leaves you feeling as if your mother, after saying she wasn't interested in watching, has walked in halfway through and started asking questions about the plot, to which you have no satisfactory answers.

"Why's he doing that, who's this now, what happened to his body?" and so on.

Will Caster (Johnny Depp) and his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) are scientists working on the development of a new type of artificial intelligence. When a group of technophobe activists led by the glaring Bree (Kate Mara) attack Will, his wife uploads his intelligence into a computer program and unwittingly creates a monster - HAL from 2001 meets Depp's Skype profile. Only former Caster friend Max Waters (Paul Bettany), who helped create the software, can save mankind, or so FBI agents Joseph Tagger (Morgan Freeman) and Buchanan (Cillian Murphy) believe.

A simplistic but occasionally visually inventive parable about the dangers of technology, Pfister's film bears all the hallmarks of a Christopher Nolan-inspired story minus the intellectual depth.

No one in the cast has a chance faced with a script that feels like the middle 100 pages of a 300-page epic, and so rushes between plot points like a pinball without ever leaving space for the audience to grasp or consider whatever it is Pfister would like you to ponder about the potential dangers of over-reliance on smartphones, tablets and broadband.

It's more of an extended screensaver than anything worth spending time on, and there's really no point in trying to explain to anyone what its point might be as there's no evidence that anyone involved actually knows or cares.

'Transcendence' opens at cinemas today

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