Movie of the Week: Transcendence
May. 7th, 2014 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jaceyH and I have missed our usual weekly moviegoing for the last few weeks due to a) being busy and b) absolutely nothing we wanted to see, but this week was a choice between Spiderman 2 and Transcendence and we figured Spidey would still be on next week, but Transcendence might... transcend. In fact it's already departed our local Cineworld, so we had to go to Batley to the big Showcase Cinema close to Ikea. (Which, of course, meant a quick trip round the Scabdinavian rat-run of retail delight.)
So Transcendence: some mixed reviews, but it was interesting and enjoyable, if a little slow at times. Slow is not necessarily a criticism, of course, and long as there's something to think about, which there is.
Dr Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is working towards creating an omniscient, sentient computer together with his wife Evelyn (Scarlett Johannson lookalike Rebecca Hall), but an attack on multiple fronts by a radical anti-tech group wipes out ten years of reseach at many different labs across North America and leaves Will dying by degtrees. He has barely a month to live. Desperate to preserve something of her husband, Evelyn persuades Will and their friend Max that though his body may die his intelligence and personality can be uploaded.
Uploading, or transcendence, is only the start of the story, though and when the transcended Will is let loose on the internet, you know things are not going to go as planned.
Much as I love Johnny Depp, who underplays Will beautifully, this film belongs to Paul Bettany as Max, the conflicted scientist who loves Will and Evelyn, but fears what they are doing. There's also a good turn from Morgan Freeman as the older mentor-figure. Maybe starting at the end and then filling in the blanks reduces the film's dramatic tension, but this isn't a movie stuffed full of car chases (thank goodness) but about ethics and consequences... and love.
It may not be for everybody but I enjoyed it.
So Transcendence: some mixed reviews, but it was interesting and enjoyable, if a little slow at times. Slow is not necessarily a criticism, of course, and long as there's something to think about, which there is.
Dr Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is working towards creating an omniscient, sentient computer together with his wife Evelyn (Scarlett Johannson lookalike Rebecca Hall), but an attack on multiple fronts by a radical anti-tech group wipes out ten years of reseach at many different labs across North America and leaves Will dying by degtrees. He has barely a month to live. Desperate to preserve something of her husband, Evelyn persuades Will and their friend Max that though his body may die his intelligence and personality can be uploaded.
Uploading, or transcendence, is only the start of the story, though and when the transcended Will is let loose on the internet, you know things are not going to go as planned.
Much as I love Johnny Depp, who underplays Will beautifully, this film belongs to Paul Bettany as Max, the conflicted scientist who loves Will and Evelyn, but fears what they are doing. There's also a good turn from Morgan Freeman as the older mentor-figure. Maybe starting at the end and then filling in the blanks reduces the film's dramatic tension, but this isn't a movie stuffed full of car chases (thank goodness) but about ethics and consequences... and love.
It may not be for everybody but I enjoyed it.
