Transcendence (2013)

Directed by: Wally Pfister
Country: USA / UK / China

Movie Review: “Transcendence” wins the prize for the most despicable sci-fi movie of the year, since I didn’t remember the last time I was so bored in a theater. Cinematographer and first-time director, Wally Pfister, should take some more lessons from the notable filmmaker Christopher Nolan, who appears here as executive producer, because his directorial debut seems more convoluted and artificial than any type of super technological intelligence you can imagine. The story follows Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp), a reputed scientist whose innovative discoveries in the field of artificial intelligence make him a target for an extremist anti-technological organization. Caster is shot dead, but his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), with the precious help of their best friend Max Watters (Paul Bettany), will continue to maintain Caster’s dream alive, making his consciousness inhabit a quantum computer and connecting it to the Internet. Executed on autopilot, the film is visually uninteresting and deficiently structured, being a catastrophe as a thriller. Jack Paglen’s worthless script made every performance go down in the same wave of ineffectiveness (and Depp and Hall even have my admiration!), in a film that was condemned to failure since the first moment it started to be filmed. The incredibly bad “Transcendence” is one of those films that keeps you eternally waiting for something creative to happen. Parched in emotions and opaque in conception, it’s the perfect example of what a sci-fi thriller should not be.