(Wally Pfister, 2014, USA/China/UK)
Christopher Nolan’s usual cinematographer, Wally Pfister, makes the leap to directing with this high-concept technothriller, an ambitious venture that ends up being as disappointingly bland as it is poorly conceived. A-list character actor Johnny Depp stars as Dr. Will Caster, an artificial intelligence (or AI) scientist eager to create a sentient computer capable of self-aware consciousness and greater-than-human intelligence; this moment of creation, known as the technological singularity amongst most AI researchers, is designated ‘transcendence’ by Caster in an early tech-conference speech, giving the film its lofty (if pretentious) title. Shortly thereafter, though, Caster is shot with a radioactive bullet by anti-technology terrorists, forcing his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and best friend Max (Paul Bettany) to upload his consciousness into a quantum supercomputer in an attempt to save his mind. Since this is a thriller, not a comedy, one can easily guess what happens next: Caster’s human intellect quickly fuses with the computer’s synthetic intelligence to achieve the singularity promised by the title, leading to a race against time to stop the newly formed sentience before it destroys humanity in a nuclear holocaust or enslaves us all in an artificial reality.
Cinema Charchuk 