Runtime: 1 hours, 59 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Wally Pfister
Quick Impressions:
Wally Pfister is best known as Christopher Nolan’s go-to cinematographer. He was director of photography not just for Nolan’s Batman trilogy, but also for basically all his other famous films (Momento, Insomnia, Inception). Back when I originally heard Pfister had decided to scoot over into the director’s chair for the first time, I got kind of excited. But then time passed and I forgot all about the entire project—until Pfister’s name flashed on the screen during the opening credits this evening.
Honestly, I think even if you didn’t go in knowing that the director of Transcendence had a high profile background in cinematography, you’d figure it out for yourself pretty quickly. This is a very visually oriented movie. There’s quite a lot of (highly successful) visual storytelling. In an early scene, a kid uses a keyboard to wedge open a door, working in tandem with Paul Bettany’s narration to establish very quickly that the computer age is over. This film is all about spaces and ways to occupy them, and much of it looks really cool even when it doesn’t have to. (The nanite mist, for example, could easily be invisible or just vaguely cloudy, but in this movie, it’s designed to catch the eye.) And I’m pretty sure Will and Evelyn Caster must have hired a cinematographer to help design that underground laboratory. I can imagine Will’s eerie, not-quite-human voice advising her, “Now we’re going to need a long, white corridor that you will look mesmerizing walking down. It will be replete with visual symbolism, sex appeal, horror, and mystery.”
The movie looks pretty good (though not as good as Oblivion, the film that I couldn’t help remembering as I watched this one). On a superficial level, Transcendence is very appealing. The script is also (ultimately) pretty deep. The story suffers a little in character development, though. There’s a frustrating disconnect between the lovely surface and the deeper meanings, and I think it’s because even though the cast is fantastic, the talented actors are not given time to reveal their characters to us gradually.
Several times—like literally a million separate times (okay, not literally)—I thought to myself, “This would really work better as a TV show.” I keep hearing that nowadays TV is way better than movies could ever hope to be, but I don’t believe it. In this particular case, however, I think television might be the superior medium. It’s not that you can’t tell a satisfying story in two hours. It’s that the type of story Transcendence tells isn’t as effective when it feels rushed. We really need to connect to the characters. You could take a season of television to tell the same story, and I think audiences would be more pleased with the results.
The Good:
I’ve mentioned that Transcendence reminds me a lot of Oblivion. You know what else it reminds me of? Everything.
Okay, not everything. But mostly everything. In the beginning, it made me think of Her. Then it reminded me of stuff I think (and write) (and worry) about all the time. Then it kind of turned into Rosemary’s Baby for a while. And—though this may seem improbable—by the end, I was thinking, This reminds me of The Iliad…except now it reminds me of Billy Budd. (Not until the final scenes of the movie did I realize, I don’t think the Easter weekend release date was an accident. You could easily take this whole thing as a Christ allegory.)
On the plus side, you’re never intellectually bored while watching this movie. After I got done being distracted by the memory of all the incredibly exciting new summer movie previews, I spent the first third of the movie trying to figure out if Transcendence is really giving us something worthwhile or simply coasting by, cleverly reminding us of fairly fascinating stuff our entire society is currently obsessed with. I found myself wondering, Does this movie actually have anything to say, or is it just throwing out buzz words and captivating images?
Ultimately, the movie is not shallow, and the story is well constructed (if not always as well told as it could be). But personally, I was not convinced that it wasn’t just slapdash topical mediocrity until it was almost over. About halfway through, I started realizing, This movie could end like X, but if it doesn’t make that move, then it’s really generic and mediocre and not worth people’s time. Fortunately, however, the movie redeems itself by having a worthy ending. Interestingly (to me), my husband told me afterwards that he had assumed it would end that way the entire time. For me, the film often seemed like a horror movie, a nightmare, a primal fantasy turned all-engulfing terror. For him, watching Transcendence was a mainly frustrating, infuriating experience because he approached it with a different set of expectations and wanted to throttle at least one of the characters most of the time.
What Transcendence actually gives us reminds me a bit of the last thing Willy Wonka says to Charlie (in the 1971 film, anyway). You kind of feel like the movie has been toying with us all this time, trying to see if it can freak us out, being deliberately ambiguous and provocatively misleading, not unlike the tonally confusing Willy Wonka.
Without spoiling the film, I think this movie intends for us to revel in the kind of messy ambiguity that is an essential part of being human.
Watching really does keep you on your toes. Somehow, the character interactions feel less satisfying than they should, but all the time you’re asking yourself, what is this movie doing? Is it a sci-fi thriller? Is it a horror movie? Is it a love story? Is it actually about questioning faith? Is it about myth building? Is it about the dangers of misunderstanding, the perils of focusing on the wrong thing?
In the end, I think I’d call it a metaphorical meditation on grief, almost like a little parable. Johnny Depp may be the star of the movie, but the story is about Rebecca Hall, and the person who recognizes the worth of her particular story is Paul Bettany, and so he’s telling it to all of us, for our benefit.
Best Scene Visually:
I was blown away by the introduction of Kate Mara’s character. I’m not exaggerating. It truly amazed me.
Well there she is! I thought. The strength of the impression stunned me, took me by surprise. I mean, movies do this all the time. On the one hand, it’s pretty standard stuff. We get a shot of a bunch of characters, and one of them pointedly stands out.
So when that happened, I immediately started paying attention to the way she was being shown, trying to figure out how he was achieving that effect. What was he doing to make her stand out?
And that’s the really amazing part. I could never quite figure it out. (It’s not that she’s Kate Mara. Kate Mara is like the least famous member of her family.)
Afterwards, I mentioned it to my husband, and he replied, “Well, she was in the center of the screen.”
But that’s just it. She wasn’t in the center of the screen. She also wasn’t the only one dressed in red/wearing a conspicuous scarf/mysteriously sitting in the glow of a spot light. How did he do that? How did he draw so much attention to her so subtly?
And it wasn’t just that I noticed her. It was that I immediately knew almost exactly who she was and what made her tick when she hadn’t even been introduced yet. How is that even possible?
As I watched, I could never quite figure it out. In the car, my husband suggested that her dramatic eye make-up made her stand out. Maybe so. But in that case, why did I think, Oh, I know exactly who she is instead of simply asking myself, Hey, is that Avril Lavigne?
Maybe I’ll never know. But this piece of entirely visual storytelling worked exceptionally well in my opinion.
Best Scene:
To be honest, what I’m going to remember about this movie is the introduction of Kate Mara’s character, and that great moment when the kid shoves the keyboard in the door. (We get to see that twice.) But surely that’s not the intended takeaway of this film.
To be less honest, I’ll say that the best scene is the final scene. That also gives us a very memorable image. And Paul Bettany’s narration is good, too. Honestly, sometimes I think I would prefer to listen to the story than to watch it, so maybe this would work better as a book, too.
I also loved the farewell between Morgan Freeman’s character (Joseph Tagger) and Evelyn Caster (Rebecca Hall). That’s one of the most intense, exciting, thrillingly charged moments in the movie. In fact, Evelyn’s ongoing response is incredibly engaging. I’ve always liked Rebecca Hall, and in the last third of the film, she gets the opportunity to give a very captivating performance.
Best Action Sequence:
This is the wrong movie to watch if you’re looking for mind-blowing action. I like the late “rescue” from the motel room. It just feels very quick and urgent.
The Negatives:
This movie should be better than it is, but it’s not. For a long time, I sat staring at the screen asking myself, What is wrong? This film seems well made, and it raises questions about topics I’ve been fascinated with for a long time. It raises serious questions about science, ethics, religion, grieving, faith, wish-fulfillment, myth-building. So why do I feel so disconnected from it?
All I can say is that the character development is lacking. It’s hard to explain why. But when I think back trying to remember my favorite parts, it’s very difficult. So many brilliant, charismatic actors, and yet so few moments that stick out. Something’s wrong there. The characters just aren’t given any time to win over the audience. A movie could be flat out horrible and still cause people to say with a satisfied giggle, “Remember that part when X did Y?” (I should specify that Y is an action, not a person (in most cases.)) We just don’t get any of that in this film.
Johnny Depp is one of the most charismatic, watchable actors around, but in this movie, he seems a lot like a robot well before his consciousness flows into a computer. I don’t think there’s actually anything wrong with the performance. The problem is, he’s Johnny Depp, and the audience is going to expect him to be there dazzling us throughout the movie. But the movie is really much less about Will than Evelyn, and Depp’s role is just not a very showy one (which might not matter with most stars, but certainly seems likely to baffle and disappoint an audience rabidly devoted to Johnny Depp).
Cillian Murphy is another actor with intense charisma. He’s totally wasted here. Morgan Freeman makes his character standout, but part of the reason we’re so interested in this man is because he’s being played by Morgan Freeman. We really don’t have a lot of background on the character and who he is as a person. (We just know where he works.)
Paul Bettany and Rebecca Hall give two strong performances that actually work—when they’re allowed to. So much of the time, though, these two are getting swept offscreen hastily or presented in a fragmented, disorienting way. I feel like the movie wants to surprise us, and in order to do so, it keeps us at a ridiculous distance from the central characters and withholds a lot of key information. We really don’t know much about Evelyn’s day-to-day life, and we also don’t know how much she knows. That’s all kind of frustrating.
By far the most maddeningly underdeveloped character, though, is Kate Mara’s extremely charismatic (but ill-defined) Bree. Her scene in the tent (or wherever they are) with Paul Bettany’s Max just feels painfully anticlimactic. Watching the start of their little heart-to-heart, I thought, Ooh, here comes her backstory. Now we’ll learn more about her and this mysterious group of anarchists. Except we don’t. We don’t learn anything. Probably the biggest problem with the movie is the complete lack of motivating information possessed by this mysterious group. Based on their behavior, we expect them to have some kind of secret intelligence, but honestly, they are entirely fear based. Now possibly that’s intentional and is intended to hammer home a point to audience about the nature of fear, hearsay, misinformation, knee-jerk panic. But because of the lack of any substance to this character and her group, watching the movie becomes a somewhat frustrating, unsatisfying experience.
Now in that scene we do learn more about Max. But here’s the thing. You watch it and think, Wow, this would be such a profound, shocking moment—if I cared. Seriously, if this exchange happened on Game of Thrones, everybody would gasp and spend days chattering about it online. The problem is, as I watched, I was aware that the scene should elicit a powerful reaction, but I didn’t feel any stirrings of anything like that. And I know why. It’s because we haven’t spent enough time with Max or Bree for any of this to matter to us particularly.
My husband was so frustrated with the character of Bree. He spent most of the movie wanting to throw her out the window. He just found her completely exasperating, and this anecdote of hers almost sent him over the edge. “Why was she so worried about the monkey on the screen, anyway? Why wasn’t she more concerned with the monkey in the chair?” Of course, this line of questioning led us to speculate that perhaps the movie intentionally shows us the dangers of focusing obsessively on the wrong thing. (Both Evelyn and Max disappear off the face of the earth—as far as most people are concerned—for a huge portion of the movie, and all the people in charge are like, “Oh well. Let’s worry about what might be happening with some computer.”)
I think the movie’s ending goes quite a long way toward redeeming the entire cinematic experience. But it’s also too impressed with itself. I wish I could talk more frankly about a lot of the late events in the film. I won’t because I don’t want to spoil the movie. I’ll just say again that in the end, this movie really reminded me of Oblivion (and a little of Frankenstein). I’ll also reiterate that I think the whole thing is actually a metaphorical parable about grief. One of the strengths (or possibly the weaknesses) of Transcendence is that it forces you to ask a bunch of questions and try to answer them. Then it pulls the rug out from under you by asking, Are you sure those are even the right questions? I suppose that does make for a reasonably satisfying ending, but it also creates a very frustrating cinematic experience.
Overall:
Transcendence certainly is not bad. I wouldn’t call it great, though. The ideas that it puts out there are all much better than anything it does with them. Some movies are fun to watch even though they’re only fluff. This one is that rare opposite that has quite a bit of deep, important stuff to say, but is about the farthest thing from fun to watch far too much of the time. Now it might improve on repeat viewings, and it will also probably seem better on the small screen when audiences haven’t spent money to see it expecting lots and lots of Johnny Depp.
If you like Rebecca Hall, she does (eventually) have a very good part here, and Paul Bettany is also pretty great as the narrator. As I think back on Transcendence, I’m glad that I watched it because I came away slightly changed by the experience. It’s a pretty story to look back on, and one that knows that it presents itself with a deceptive simplicity. That lovely ending is much messier than it may look at first glance. So is humanity. That’s what makes life worthwhile. (Does containing this pearl of wisdom make Transcendence worthwhile, though? Anyone looking for such insight can surely find similarly inspiring works in the public domain, and movie tickets are so expensive.) Still I’d be stunned if you left Transcendence sorry you saw it (less than thrilled that you paid, perhaps, but never sorry that you saw it).