Transcendence - hopefully not my last film of the year

The writing was sort of on the wall for Transcendence before I even watched it.  When I checked out its IMDB entry I discovered that 'people who liked this' also liked such abominations as Lucy and The Tourist.  Sigh.  But of course silly me I never checked that before the physical DVD was in my possession; so what is a film-nerd to do but watch it anyway and prepare to rage?  So here we go.

Johnny Depp is miscast as Will Caster, a socially introverted caricature of a scientist who is obsessed by artificial intelligence (AI) and who wants to create a computer that can think.  His wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) gets to be all weepy and emotional about things (cos she's a women innit) and his mentors & colleagues get to sound all scientific.  Paul Bettany is Evelyn's unemotional foil (cos he's a man innit) while Morgan Freeman stands about sounding like the narrator and getting all the lines the writers think are most profound - cos that's what his career has become.  When Caster is shot by anti-AI terrorists (led by Kara Mara - another good actor who is in this film why?) his team decide to try to save his mind by uploading him to a computer.

This then leads us naturally into familiar science fiction territory - what does it mean to be human, and can a machine ever be so.  Except that the film completely shies away from telling this story.  Instead it turns Johnny Depp's character into some sort of big bad with a huge shoot-out and lots of convenient plot holes that can't be ignored in such a terrible film.

I'm almost more depressed that I've got used to films like this than their actual existence.  Lucy especially is a film very similar to this, a film that never gets deeper than a mere scratch into anything approaching proper science fiction, but somehow thinks itself deeply profound.  It's a film that thinks it's being clever because it asks how a human can prove they are self-aware, but then never goes on to explore that.  It's a film that feels like a marketing opportunity without a script, a collection of famous cast members without any characters for them to play, where the final act of descends into an action shooter because that's what the committee that 'wrote' the script thinks audiences want these days.

In short, this is a very poor attempt at science fiction.  Oh, and Cillian Murphy is also in it for a bit - talk about wasted acting talent.

Some of you might be surprised to find me blogging about Science Fiction trash rather than conducting an in-depth review of the new Star Wars film.  The truth is that I have not seen it yet; I just don't get along very well with insanely packed cinemas of fan-boys.  Probably go and see it between Christmas and the New Year.  Yes I am excited about it, but the crushing failure of the hopefully soon-to-be-retconned prequels leaves me hoping that it simply isn't terrible.  Watch this space for my thoughts.  Merry Xmas all!