Thursday, April 24, 2014

Film Review - Transcendence (2014)

Transcendence stars Johnny Depp as Dr Will Caster, a scientist who is working on artificial intelligence when he is shot after a conference, as he is dying he comes up with an idea to Trascend his physical body, a decision that could have a big impact on mankind.

Transcendence is not a very good film, not at all and the reasons are two:

- Firstly the script for this film is horrible, throwing together ideas to make at least 2 features in their own right and does next to nothing with them, case in point being the anti technology group that for the most part just sits around looking at a fire and working out what to do next and the other of a person wanting to live forever through AI just comes across as downright stupid and over time becomes very predictable.

- The second is the direction, this is the directorial debut of Wally Pfister, Chris Nolan's long serving cinematographer and here he shows that he might not have been paying attention when working for his old boss as he seems more concerned with creating nice images then trying to make a good movie, methinks he should've started small scale with a couple of nature docos before making the leap to directing feature films.

- And lastly is the subpar acting, Depp is okay and it is nice to see him being normal for a change but after a while all I could see him doing was going through the motions, Paul Bettany just walks around wandering to himself "What the hell am I doin ere", Kate Mara just stares off into space for the most part and Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy just stand about saying sweet fuck all, this is no way to waste a good cast.

There was one thing I did like about this film and that was Rebecca Hall's performance, someone at least who tried their very best to do something with this film and for the most part she succeeds as it was the only time I didn't want to fall asleep whilst watching this film, I hope that she gets better work down the track as she's an underrated actress.

So all in all, Transcendence was an A grade Turkey with poor story, direction and acting all around, rent the original Tron and Sneakers with Robert Redford instead of this film, .5 out of 5.

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