Transcendence

What It's About: Johnny Depp is a brilliant doctor with a brilliant doctor wife and a brilliant doctor best friend, who have all made great strides in artificial intelligence. However, a needlessly-complicated plan hatched by an anti-technology terrorist group leads to Depp's death. Then bad decisions by wife & best friend lead to his consciousness being uploaded into a computer system, and increasingly-bad decisions by wife leads to him becoming the 2014 version of SkyNet.

WARNING: CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

The thing that strikes me most about this movie is that it has no idea what it wants to be. Is it a warning against humanity's increasing reliance on technology? Is it a pod movie? Is it a tragic love story? It tries to be all three, and only succeeds in oddly going out of its way to be more illogical than even its premise would suggest.

The movie is one of those that opens in the same place it ends. It lets you know everything has gone to shit, and that humanity is living in a world like the TV show "Revolution" so the question becomes how exactly we got there.

The first problem is that the plot is made possible because the anti-technology group that plays a huge role in the movie does a perfectly planned attack on multiple fronts, but then decides that rather than kill Depp instantly, they'd rather he have an overly-elaborate, exotic, and drawn-out death. This conveniently gives wife & best friend time to recreate at least part of him into an advanced AI system that the three had created. This leads to problem two, in that a lot of things happen in this movie not out of logical advancement, but because the screenplay demands it in order to move the story along. Wife & best friend's plan to keep Depp "alive" works not through their efforts (which are contained in way too short of a period of time), but because it literally just does for no apparent reason.

Problem #3 is time. We are given time with two groups, and while we appear to spend days with one group, the other does things that would take years, far beyond even the five that the story gives itself to complete. Wife gives DeppNet enough power to do literally anything, since apparently being hooked into anything that's connected to the internet gives a machine the power to create structures from scratch, heal the sick and injured, and even at one point make it rain. A lot. DeppNet can do all this, but is still susceptible to things like wi-fi dead spots, viruses, and battery life limitations.

Then there's the ending. Oh man the ending. To top off its schizophrenic nature and complete inability to withstand even the slightest bit of logical thought, the movie throws in a Shyamalan-esque twist at the end. That also doesn't stand up to any scrutiny. So if you see it, you also have that to look forward to.

On the plus side, the acting performances are fine. The directing is decent, aside from the foreshadowing of the grand attack by the terrorist group, since we alerted ahead of time via shots of random objects and ominous music that some serious shit is about to go down. The pace is brisk, and it never feels slow during the near 2 hour run time. You might have a better time than I did if A.) you don't spend most of the movie trying to remember where you saw Depp's wife before (turns out for me it was "The Prestige") and B.) you don't think about what happens on screen. At all.

RATING: **1/2 out of 5. It tries to *ahem* transcend the sci-fi genre, but due to self-imposed issues, doesn't make it.