Transcendence

Technology is a good servant, but a bad master that will steal your soul, ok? It gives the impression that Pfister is a senile old man (while he’s so young) who would "ban all those internets!". And he decided to share this attitude with the world through this would-be “techno"-thriller where the attitude to everyday technologies is like that your great-great grand-father would have if you went back in time and tried to explain to him what the Internet, cloud computing, uploading/downloading is. This is all very unintentionally funny, little seen method, but this is paradoxically the most minor problem that Transcendence suffers from. Much worse it that in the second half, Pfister gains a thirst for pontification and so he starts preaching about the state of society, the world, the contents of your fridge, the heavens... Simply anything that happened to occur to him or bug him during filming. The only thing is that he’s really dumb in what he says and how he says it. If onto this “quasi-Malick-like" concept, you graft scenes like IT guys cum FBI agents jumping out of a tunnel in the middle of the desert, armed to the teeth to do a bit of ratatatat in the direction of some nano-zombies while spouting wisdom such as “don’t go near them or they will infect you with a virus and upload your mind to their cloud" (meant of course absolutely seriously), then there remains nothing else to do but shake your head in disbelief or beat the table with it or else just make cruel fun out of the creators. And that is the only level where Pfister’s debut works outstandingly well. (2014-08-28)

I get the feeling that Wally Pfister bit off more than he could chew and couldn't transform his ambitions into a form that would allow us to speak about Transcendence as a powerful experience. The position of a director is simply more demanding than that of a cinematographer. Pfister evidently tried to shoot not only an entertaining genre film but above all a film with a deeper meaning. The result is a strange mishmash that neither entertains nor gives the impression of an artistic work. What good is it to engage a significant personality and acting chameleon Johnny Depp when the director tries to suppress him and he doesn't really fit into such a role typologically? He is simply wasted in it, and I can think of a dozen better candidates who would have been much more effective. The prevailing feeling in the end is disappointment and the impression that I have in front of me a grandiose but pathetic-looking B-movie. Overall impression: 40%. (2016-03-17)

This is what a film would look like if Christopher Nolan got high, drunk, and filmed a philosophical sci-fi in a cheerful mood with a lot of unanswered questions about saving the world. It’s hard to understand how so many renowned names and relatively solid actors could agree to such a screenplay travesty, because I can't remember a worse job by a screenwriter in a blockbuster in recent memory. Nothing works, neither the emotions, nor the logic of the plot, nor the chemistry of the characters. Incredibly poorly directed flop. (2015-04-16)

We haven’t seen anything like this in a long time. This movie could’ve been saved by a single thing – if it suddenly turned black-and-white and Johnny Depp appeared before Rebecca Hall wearing an angora sweater. After the premiere, I heard three girls of about eight gushing about how they’d write on their blogs that they’ve been to the new Johnny Depp flick and how great it was. So don’t hang your head and go watch this. After all, it’s executive produced by Christopher Nolan, so what more could you possibly desire? (2014-04-16)

Disclaimer: I will spoil a lot in this review. I went to see Transcendence in a cinema and had absolutely no idea what to expect. The critics were pretty rough about it. But when do I actually listen to the critics, right? Plus, it seems as if the journalists were conducting some kind of a witch-hunt for Johnny Depp. They say his movies are not so good anymore, they say his characters are not that interesting and that this movie is overcomplicated… I don’t know what they watched, but I think they left during the first ten minutes, because if they watched the whole movie, these alleged movie fans could never say such bullshit about Transcendence. True, the first half an hour was pretty demanding, I was almost thinking that I’ll take a nap in the cinema, but as soon as the first discussion about God began, the movie got quite interesting. Wally Pfister created perfect philosophical grounds for a nice thriller. What if somebody found God, what if that God materialized into a human shape and what if he tried to rule? Would he try to rule in a good way, or a bad way? Hard to say as people would still not understand it. And as the movie repeats several times, people fear what they cannot understand. And that’s what turns it into an absolutely amazing sci-fi in the second half, something the director immediately won me over with. The finale ended in the best way it could. It contemplated over feelings, good and evil and I really liked that. I especially liked the scene where Johnny is deciding whether to help his beloved or not. I will say nothing more on purpose. You simply have to watch it and either the finale will really please you…or not. And I think that causes the overall rating of the film as well. (2014-05-07)