Transcendence

At very least, a strange screenplay kills a promising idea about a human Skynet. Pfister gives us beautiful, polished images, but he should have paid more attention during Nolan’s directing lessons. The storyline doesn’t hold together as it should, too episodic and the characters’ behavior is pretty chaotic. For the first time in a long time, Depp acts quite pleasantly and the cool music raises the mood a little. (07/10/2014)

We haven’t seen anything like this in a long time. This movie could’ve been saved by a single thing – if it suddenly turned black-and-white and Johnny Depp appeared before Rebecca Hall wearing an angora sweater. After the premiere, I heard three girls of about eight gushing about how they’d write on their blogs that they’ve been to the new Johnny Depp flick and how great it was. So don’t hang your head and go watch this. After all, it’s executive produced by Christopher Nolan, so what more could you possibly desire? (04/16/2014)

At its most basic, Transcendence is not as stupid as some people who in their joy at having discovered a couple of holes in the logic have claimed. At its core, it’s a pretty decent sci-fi premise that greatly suffers from the behaviour of the main characters, which at times feels really weird and stupid. The actors are good, the technical aspect is fine, too, but I have a problem with its hysterical technophobic tone. Yet, in spite of all the issues (mostly in the script) that Transcendence has, it is still a pretty watchable movie. But somewhere deep inside there is potential for a lot more, that much is clear. (07/02/2014)

Technology is a good servant, but a bad master that will steal your soul, ok? It gives the impression that Pfister is a senile old man (while he’s so young) who would "ban all those internets!". And he decided to share this attitude with the world through this would-be “techno"-thriller where the attitude to everyday technologies is like that your great-great grand-father would have if you went back in time and tried to explain to him what the Internet, cloud computing, uploading/downloading is. This is all very unintentionally funny, little seen method, but this is paradoxically the most minor problem that Transcendence suffers from. Much worse it that in the second half, Pfister gains a thirst for pontification and so he starts preaching about the state of society, the world, the contents of your fridge, the heavens... Simply anything that happened to occur to him or bug him during filming. The only thing is that he’s really dumb in what he says and how he says it. If onto this “quasi-Malick-like" concept, you graft scenes like IT guys cum FBI agents jumping out of a tunnel in the middle of the desert, armed to the teeth to do a bit of ratatatat in the direction of some nano-zombies while spouting wisdom such as “don’t go near them or they will infect you with a virus and upload your mind to their cloud" (meant of course absolutely seriously), then there remains nothing else to do but shake your head in disbelief or beat the table with it or else just make cruel fun out of the creators. And that is the only level where Pfister’s debut works outstandingly well. (08/28/2014)

A film with a great idea, simple but impressive. I'll bet you anything that if (producer) Christopher Nolan had shot it exactly the way (his cinematographer) Wally Pfister shot it, and if he had cast someone currently more popular than "that washed-up buffoon Depp" in the lead role, the ratings here would certainly look different. Redder. Too bad, but what can you do? I enjoyed Transcendence many times more than, say, Interstellar. Interesting plot from the beginning to the end, believable characters played by excellent actors, no complicated half-baked explanations... And that beautiful hesitation about who is good and who is bad (if anyone). In short, a spectacle to my taste, I round up four and a half stars to the 61 percent on purpose. (01/24/2015)