Depp has played many an antic genius, and he slipped inside the body of an Old West chameleon in Rango. The two lead actors have occupied similar roles before. We’re going to transcend them.” He means subdue and inhabit them, engulf and devour. When a posse led by old friend Joseph Tagger (Morgan Freeman, who has also played God a few times) and FBI agent Buchanan (Cillian Murphy) confronts Will in Brightwood, he tells Evelyn, “We’re not going to fight them.
The man who will soon shoot Will asks him if, by advancing artificial intelligence, he’s not creating a God, and Will wryly replies, “Isn’t that what man has always done?” That’s just what Will, the ghost in the computer, has in mind. And as God’s Not Dead stacks the rhetorical cards for the Deity’s existence, the Pfister film eventually hangs back with the Luddites.
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Like God’s Not Dead, the fundamentalist Christian movie that has become a popular hit, Transcendence is essentially a dramatized debate. (FIND: Invasion of the Body Snatchers among TIME’s Top 10 Sci-Fi Movies of the 1950s) Is this a Good Word or a triumph of Will? Crystalline particles rise from the ground and catch the wind (as in the 1956 sci-fi essential Invasion of the Body Snatchers) to spread the new gospel across the earth. Under cyber-Will’s instructions, she buys up a desolate, depressed town called Brightwood and builds an enormous facility, whose screens show Will’s omniscient visage and whose machines can perform miracle surgery, like giving sight to a man blind from birth. With some misgivings but much love, Evelyn keeps the system functioning and growing. When he dies, a half hour into the movie, Evelyn and Max unplug PINN and - in a lovely little frisson - the last thing we see among the tumult of digits on the computer screen is the blink of a message: “ANYONE THERE?” Weeks away from certain death, he determines to upload his intelligence, his very soul and essence, into a computer. One of the RIFTers shoots Will with a bullet that gives him radiation poisoning. They’re sort of the 21st century Amish, except that in a 9/11-ish neo-Luddite attack, they kill computer programmers with exploding slices of birthday cake. That notion is toxic to blond Bree (Kate Mara) and her cohorts in a radical, back-to-basics group called RIFT (Revolutionary Independence From Technology). Will PINN be the next step in technological and possibly human evolution? He has devised a Physically Independent Neural Network (PINN) that could build on the work of another scientist, who has managed to upload the brain of a rhesus monkey. Max hopes to cure cancer and Alzheimer’s, but Will wants to create an AI greater than the combined brainpower of all humans who have ever lived on Earth. Flash back to five years earlier, when Will and his friend and colleague Max Waters (Paul Bettany) speak at a Silicon Valley conference. Streetlights don’t work a cell phone is discarded a computer keyboard is used for a doorstop. In the not too distant future, the world is without the Internet.
Just don’t tell the techies who masterminded the cool CGI stuff. A movie like Transcendence may be pertinent in its political reverberations of all computer data held in a cloud and monitored by the NSA, but it also rails against the tools its makers so artfully employ. AI parables usually assume a Doomsday tone, preaching fear of the devices that keep the modern world running - including the computers whose magic makes today’s action-movie effects so very effective. Next year, Marvel’s Avengers will reunite to battle a brilliant computer (and Oedipal wreck) in Age of Ultron. Frink revives the dead Homer as a chatty screen saver. and as recent as this week’s episode of The Simpsons, in which Dr. Smart machines that may serve or dominate mankind are as old as Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon and Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (READ: Corliss’s review of Spike Jonze’s Her) To keep her love alive, she will enable his existence as a sentient being whose implications she may not have quite thought through. Will, a leading light in the study of artificial intelligence, and Evelyn, his devoted research assistant, are bound in love and work. Joaquin Phoenix fell hard for the voice of Scarlett Johansson - who wouldn’t? But in Transcendence, the provocative but ponderous science-fiction thriller written by Jack Paglem and directed by Wally Pfister, the dating game is an endgame.
A love story between a human and a computer: we got one for Christmas, and it was called Her.
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