I love great science-fiction movies; heck, I love good ones and bad ones, too.  What I don’t love are dull pseudo-scientific treatises on philosophy and morality which leave logic stranded somewhere in the desert near Brightwood.  That’s where the widow Evelyn Caster (Rebecca Hall) establishes a massive and expensive underground computer lab where she keeps alive the consciousness of her dead husband Will (Johnny Depp), all without the knowledge of federal authorities.  This scientific heresy leads, of course, to a complete reversal of societal status.

The premise is interesting, if not compelling — that human consciousness can or will somehow, someday be digitized — leading to a new level of evolution, one what may leave flesh and blood people at a distinct disadvantage.  Technology as threat is not new in science-fiction, but that premise is usually presented in a more exciting manner than in Wally Pfister’s debut film as a director.  He keeps the action on an intimate scale (which I usually appreciate as an antidote to bloated, empty special effects extravaganzas), yet Transcendence is too personal for its own good.  It also doesn’t help that the script kills off its most interesting character after a half-hour.

Lots of scientific jargon is bandied about, and there are constant screens of complex mathematical data and formulas flowing like never-ending digital waterfalls in scene after scene, but somehow the film skips past the most rudimentary steps of logic in its storytelling.  And it becomes less and less convincing as the super-computer with a human personality gains power.  Naturally, there are people who want to stop it before it takes over everything, and there is some real potential for conflict there that is largely wasted.  When the fight does come, it is staged in ridiculous fashion and, strangely enough, never reconciled in a realistic way.

Pfister’s film looks good; he insisted on filming with authentic film stock, but it has so many digital effects that even that choice seems compromised.  The story is global in scope, but is so delicately balanced on the personalities of just a few people that it never achieves the gravitas to which it aspires, despite the presence of Morgan Freeman, who is perhaps the greatest living embodiment of gravitas.  It also reveals the end at the beginning, which is a mistake, and never bothers to detail how things get to that starting point from where it ends.  It’s a cautionary computer movie that looks so cool that its threat is never presented properly.  For a better, though dated, exploration of what artificial sentience would mean to the human race, watch 1970’s Colossus: The Forbin Project.  Transcendence is a mere shell of that film, and many others besides.  ☆ ☆.  23 April 2014.