Movie Monday-Transcendence

Transcendence. WOW. Part of me wants to say “WHAT THE CRAP did I just watch,” and the other part of me liked it.  I will warn you though, there are definitely spoilers below!

From the beginning of the movie when Max (Paul Bettany) is walking through this dry, desert-like town, where keyboards are used as door stops, and all sorts of technological devices are strewn about the ground, you kind of get an idea of what will happen in the show.  But then, he walks into one of the many buildings that appear to be crumbling to the dry earth. Inside there is a little patch of green grass with sunflowers growing and dripping with dew. Somehow, in this world where life seems to be struggling to hold on, here, something is different.  Now it seems this is not just a show about “controlling technology or it will control you.”  The point of this movie isn’t, in my opinion, saying that technology will take over and destroy everything because we don’t understand it. Instead I feel this movie, asks us to question what it is we really are hoping to gain from technology, and to open our minds to the possibilities.

I definitely expected a little more entertainment, considering the director was the cinematographer for Inception, but it did have some interesting visuals.  The movie did a good job of helping you understand that Will (the brain of the worlds leading specialist in AI that was uploaded to a computer, and then to the internet, and then to everything else) really was EVERYWHERE, but I don’t think the movie did a good job of explaining how the science came to be, and therefore I felt a huge disconnect between our reality, and the films reality.  The movie did a good job at conveying it's different messages, but a less than mediocre job at creating a world that made the film believable or even something I could merely pretend was believable. 

The acting, well, Johnny Depp as Will, was kind of an odd choice in my opinion.  Depp is such a good physical actor, and to be playing a role with virtually no physicality was kind of distracting to me.  Rebecca Hall’s portrayal of Evelyn Caster, Will’s wife, and the person who uploads Will to the internet, and helps facilitate his growth, fell sort of flat for me.  She was pretty much just a one-note character, just like pretty much every other character in the movie if I’m to be honest. Paul Bettany as Max however, was the saving grace for me.  He showed dimension, personal conflict, and helps to keep you in the poorly constructed “world” of the movie, when so many other elements threaten to throw you out of it.  With so many “big name” actors (Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy also in the mix) it seemed like there was so little content, and that there were too many characters to carry on such a simple and boring storyline.

Some people it seems, are really caught up in the whole, “love beyond the grave” thing as an overwhelming message in the film, which I can see, but I don’t really understand it.  I don’t think the point is merely that.  Evelyn, after uploading Will to the computer, really does believe it is him, and instead of just being with him, she goes on to continue their work together of trying to change and heal the world. If all she cared about was keeping him alive, the story could have ended 20 minutes into it.  The real conflict comes in when we realize, Will being omnipresent and omniscient, is something that humans, and their very narrow view of reality, cannot understand.  And since there is nothing more scary than the “unknown,” not being able to fully comprehend Will’s motives, causes many to want to destroy him.  An anti AI group along with the government works to take down Will because their fear is he is trying to control and run the earth.  Evelyn gets scared and begins to doubt that this computer ever was her husband, and so she begins to work with them to help take him down. 

I’ve read that some people who watched the film don’t like that Will isn’t more villainous, but I really like this choice for the story.  Will isn’t the villain.  Not really.  Maybe he is getting uncomfortably powerful, but his intentions are good, from what we ultimately can gather.  Honestly it’s hard to pin-point what the antagonist actually is in the film.  In the end, we learn Will was truly trying to help “heal the world” like Evelyn had always hoped, this really isn’t the work of a villain.  It begs the question whether or not Will, as the computer, is able to feel, as the Anti-AI group believes to be impossible.  When given the choice to save himself and Evelyn, or to sacrifice himself to let Max, his good friend, live, he ultimately chooses Max, which to me, isn’t a choice made of pure logical deductions, and therefore proves even more, that he wasn’t just an out of control computer trying to take over the world, but a being with good intentions and possible feelings.

All in all, I enjoyed the movie despite having many components that didn’t seem to work all that well.  It had interesting moments, nice visual effects, and provided an interesting twist to a pretty common storyline. I’m not certain I’ll rush out and purchase the movie, but I definitely don’t wish I could get my money back.   

            Jess