Directed by Wally Pfister, Transcendence promises much and delivers very little. The movie takes us through the premise of artificial intelligence and its dangers. But the pace of the film and the material presented makes this movie incredibly dull. With a cast consisting of Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman and Paul Bettany, you might be forgiven if you thought that this film was going to blow your mind. Unfortunately, the only thing that will be blown is the back of your skull, as you endure minute after boring minute. What started off as a epic premise, is reduced to a series of cliched and tired routines just strung together.
In the near future, the world will see a quantum leap take place in computing. The culmination of this leap is the singularity or rather Transcendence. That is the premise of this movie. The film starts off with a few hiccups. You get the feeling that the story tries to encapsulate all the Sci-fi stories that we have been exposed to in the past few years. In doing so, we are left with a odd collection of Hollywood throwaways. You will be left scratching your skull, wondering which movie you last saw that particular scene. The movie is a flight of fancy, agreed. However, that flight crashes and burns. The flow of the film is too slow, and the gaping plot holes make you think. Not about how did they do that, but more along the lines of “Why doesn’t anyone see this coming?” The length of the film is detrimental to the story. You are left feeling that, there could be a lot more to explore and that it was shot or maybe edited in the worst way possible. The idea is that you are going upload yourself to a machine, great in theory but uh-oh in reality. The ‘uh-oh’ is never really explained away. In the end, you will walk out of the theatre, wondering about the whole point of the film.
