While I spend a lot of time on this blog heralding the
innovative vision of Christopher Nolan, I’ve never mentioned the name Wally
Pfister, Nolan’s chief cinematographer and a key guiding hand in the creation
of that aforementioned vision. The
shadow of Nolan looms large over Pfister’s directorial debut Transcendence, though the end result
feels more like the work of an impressionist than a disciple.Transcendence stars Johnny Depp as Dr. Will Caster, an artificial-intelligence scientist shot with a radiation-laced bullet by anti-tech terrorists. During his last weeks, Will’s wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) works to digitize and upload her husband’s consciousness, to the dismay of their friend Max Waters (Paul Bettany). Max fears that the program Evelyn activates isn’t really Will, fears that take on weight when “Will” quickly advances beyond the realm of the possible.
Transcendence clearly rides the post-Inception wave of high-concept science fiction, a wave dominated by the technical achievement of Gravity. With Transcendence, Pfister and screenwriter Jack Paglen tackle the issue of the singularity, a post-human digital environment epitomized by the idea of “living long enough to upload.” The film poses a number of important questions about this technology – how much of a personality is changed during the dehumanizing process of uploading? What are the upward limits of “transcendence”? And at what point does AI surpass our understanding of conventional morality?
Unfortunately, Transcendence never really answers those questions, stopping short at presenting them. What’s frustrating, though, is that the film presents these questions as though they will become important plot points, as when anxiety arises about whether “Will” is really Will; though at least one scene teases an answer to the question, it’s never revisited until the conclusion, which takes the answer for granted. To be fair, this is Paglen’s film debut as well as Pfister’s, and he’s already offered something smarter than most science fiction does, but it is only half the battle.
Just as the script only takes us halfway there, the rest of the film never quite emotionally engages. Depp and Hall have genuine chemistry together, playing the quirky-scientist-couple brilliantly in the one scene they have together before Will is shot, and Hall proves herself the actual star of the show with a commanding lead as the increasingly-distraught Evelyn. As for Depp, he acquits himself rather well, playing a subdued performance that you won’t believe comes from the same man as last summer’s Tonto. The rest of the cast, though – Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy among them – are basically interchangeable, which is a shame given the range they’ve displayed elsewhere (and largely in Nolan films).
This, then, is the larger weakness of Transcendence – its inability to pass the Plinkett test,1 which requires characters to be distinct beyond physical appearance and function to the plot. Will and Evelyn for all intents and purposes pass the test, though none of the other characters do. The result is a fairly uneven film, in which two out of three running plotlines proceed purely on the requirements of the narrative itself. The film needs an antagonist for its central AI-based protagonist, so a thinly characterized terrorist group (RIFT) is created, with oblique gestures at their motives. Common sense suggests that the US government might object to the existence of “Will” on their soil, so a team of government agents chases the plot wherever it goes.
I’ve never fully understood why some moviegoers have difficulty connecting emotionally to Christopher Nolan’s work. Despite the overtly cerebral nature of his films, they’re anchored by very human stories, such that the very ending of Inception cares more for how its protagonist acts than whether what’s happening is actually real. (The same can’t be said for twist-ending flicks like The Sixth Sense, where the revelation is all.) With Transcendence, though, I feel like I’ve approximated that sensation; Will and Evelyn aside, I couldn’t engage emotionally with any of the characters on screen and indeed found several of their decisions – mostly shifts in allegiance – to be baffling beyond the necessity of the plot. I have no idea, for example, how Freeman’s character goes from desk-jockey scientist to FBI analyst, or why (potential spoilers ahead) Paul Bettany’s character joins up with RIFT – beyond, that is, the need for characters in a film to move toward the conclusion of the plot.
At the core of Transcendence is a very moving, very meaningful science-fictional take on a hetero-organic marriage between a woman and her computer – the dark response, I suppose, to Spike Jonze’s Her. Orbiting that compelling story, though, is a series of narrative false steps and mechanical storytelling that make Transcendence more of a disappointment than Pfister’s promising career to date would have foretold. One wonders what would have come of “Christopher Nolan’s Transcendence” had a more deft filmmaker been at the helm. Transcendence is just shy of a failure, feeling more like the training wheels on Pfister’s bike were taken off a bit too soon.
1 Plinkett dismantles the Star Wars prequels in a series of YouTube videos for many reasons, most prominently its failure to create characters as rich as the ones from the original trilogy. A focus group in his Phantom Menace review is able to describe with great precision the personalities of Han Solo and C-3PO but is unable to do the same for Qui-Gon Jinn and Queen Amidala.↩
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