Transcendence (Wally Pfister, 2014)

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flyonthewall2983 · #1 Post by **flyonthewall2983** » Sat Dec 21, 2013 5:44 am

Transcendance, the directing debut of DP extraordinaire Wally Pfister.

#2 Post by **Mr Sausage** » Sat Dec 21, 2013 1:19 pm

flyonthewall2983 wrote:Transcendance, the directing debut of DP extraordinaire Wally Pfister.

Dissapointing to see that it's just another 'when science attacks!' thrillers. That could just be the trailer, I guess, but it's likely more accurate than not, with the movie being just slightly less thrilling than the trailer makes out, but still exploiting conservative fears of technology while only paying lip-service to the ideas the premise suggests.

warren oates · #3 Post by **warren oates** » Fri Apr 18, 2014 4:58 pm

I think I can safely say that there's pretty much nothing to recommend in Transcendence. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen the film. If you've seen the first two minutes, the film has kind of spoiled whatever surprise it might have managed to hold back regarding the fate of its main characters. Really this reminded me of nothing so much as those few special once a season big budget extended play episodes of 70s shows like The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman and The Incredible Hulk -- like the one where they go to Cheyenne Mountain -- with more up to date VFX, of course, but no less hookiness or unreality regarding not just the ostensible "science" but the actions and motivations of almost all the characters.

The film is simultaneously too big and too small

Spoiler

So this supercomputing intelligence that's smart enough to improve itself and make breakthroughs in nanotechnology in months and years that would otherwise might have taken decades is able to be undone because of a virus that targets something in its initial source code (which hasn't been improved, rewritten or secured since then... but wait a second, isn't that precisely what we see it do the very moment it comes on-line... wait!?) So this virtual intelligence builds a giant compound in the desert (but underneath an existing town because that will somehow make it more secret -- nope, scratch that -- more cinematic!) So this massively superior intelligence proliferates itself with granular nanobots worldwide (that will also, I guess, save us all from climate change?) and somehow neither the U.S. military nor any other global powers take note until it's too late and then the response is a handful of Blackwater dudes and an uneasy partnership with eco-terrorists? Hmmm...

I could go on, but I can't really because it's starting to hurt me. The problems with the script are legion. At nearly every turn there's exposition about a whole range of details, just asking us to accept things that, if you think about them for a half second or so, make less than no sense at all. Part of it is just how many ideas this overambitious story wants to intertwine. It kind of reads like a very bad stab at Michael Crichton's territory -- A.I., nanobots, the Singularity -- like a few of his unpublished manuscripts were Frankensteined together with the Burroughs cut-up technique.

#4 Post by **domino harvey** » Fri Apr 18, 2014 5:29 pm

warren oates wrote: It kind of reads like a very bad stab at Michael Crichton's territory -- A.I., nanobots, the Singularity -- like a few of his unpublished manuscripts were Frankensteined together with the Burroughs cut-up technique.

Funny you say that, because when I read that the film contains "nanobots," my immediate thought was: "Why do a modern Lawnmower Man reboot when you could just pay to adapt Prey instead?"

flyonthewall2983 · #5 Post by **flyonthewall2983** » Fri Apr 18, 2014 5:34 pm

Depp just can't catch a break it seems.

#6 Post by **domino harvey** » Fri Apr 18, 2014 5:36 pm

flyonthewall2983 wrote:Depp just can't catch a break it seems.

He's ***SPOILER ALERT*** in the next Kevin Smith movie, so it may not be getting any better

warren oates · #7 Post by **warren oates** » Fri Apr 18, 2014 5:37 pm

Hey, it's not like he didn't read the script. And as far as it goes, he's fine in the film. He's not the problem. Unless you consider the fact that a star of his stature's signing on was likely part of what actually greenlit the whole production.

PfR73 · #8 Post by **PfR73** » Fri Apr 18, 2014 6:05 pm

I concur, the script of the film is just so weak & full of characters acting illogically. The AI is attributed god-like powers, the potential of which humans simultaneously decry & ignore, but the AI itself also fails to utilize. This script was on the Black List, and the writer's supposedly been hired for Prometheus 2 and Battlestar Galactica. How did people think this writing was good enough?

warren oates · #9 Post by **warren oates** » Fri Apr 18, 2014 6:15 pm

Well, I haven't read that draft and it might be different from the finished feature, but, really, it could be as simple as the fact that Blacklist readers/voters read lots of stuff all the time and a middling derivative dumbed down mash-up of what might have been some interesting hard sci-fi ideas actually seems better to them than most of the other standardized crap that comes across their desks -- especially everything else that passes for sci-fi nowadays.

Illithid Dude · #10 Post by **Illithid Dude** » Sat Apr 19, 2014 2:07 am

God, this movie was terrible.

Spoiler

Why did the military even attack? Honestly, except for the hypothesis that Dr. Caster was building an army, he didn't really do anything wrong. Hell, he didn't even use the army until the military launched an assault against the base. How could the military even be allowed to conduct full scale warfare in America at all, let alone do so based on little more than a guess? And then they destroy the internet? Jesus Christ. The funniest part of this all is that, not only was Dr. Caster not actually doing anything evil, he didn't even die! He lived on in the water, ultimately rendering the destruction of the internet, and, as such, modern society, as pointless.

thirtyframesasecond · Sat Apr 19, 2014 9:15 pm

Agreed - it'll hurt to try to remember what this was the dumbest film I've ever seen, but suffice to say, it is really really really bad.

Illithid Dude wrote:God, this movie was terrible.

Spoiler
Why did the military even attack? Honestly, except for the hypothesis that Dr. Caster was building an army, he didn't really do anything wrong. Hell, he didn't even use the army until the military launched an assault against the base. How could the military even be allowed to conduct full scale warfare in America at all, let alone do so based on little more than a guess? And then they destroy the internet? Jesus Christ. The funniest part of this all is that, not only was Dr. Caster not actually doing anything evil, he didn't even die! He lived on in the water, ultimately rendering the destruction of the internet, and, as such, modern society, as pointless.

The Doogster · #12 Post by **The Doogster** » Sun Apr 20, 2014 7:16 am

warren oates wrote:Well, I haven't read that draft and it might be different from the finished feature, but, really, it could be as simple as the fact that Blacklist readers/voters read lots of stuff all the time and a middling derivative dumbed down mash-up of what might have been some interesting hard sci-fi ideas actually seems better to them than most of the other standardized crap that comes across their desks -- especially everything else that passes for sci-fi nowadays.

I have access to Black List scripts before they hit the public arena, however, I'm not one of the people voting for them. Honestly!

You are right - most of the Black List scripts are average at best. Each year there are one or two standouts (interestingly, a lot of those standouts are from Harvard graduates - I'm not sure why that is). Most readers at production companies are arts graduates who have an immaculate grasp of grammar and literature, but little or no experience in being able to mentally translate a screenplay to the big screen. Most of the scripts they read look like they were written by someone from a Special Ed class, so anything that is slightly intelligent tends to get their attention.

I have a rule of thumb that says you never, ever use an acronym in a movie. Transcendence has several acronyms in it, which is the kiss of death for a movie. The problem with acronyms is that they create major passivity because someone has to break into the story and start explaining what the acronym stands for, which the audience couldn't care less about. If there's one thing that's designed to send an audience into a coma, it's dialogue exposition of scientific concepts, which creates something called "hokey dialogue syndrome."

There are other structural problems with the movie - the main character (Johnny Depp) spends the whole movie on a computer monitor. The technical term for that is "passive protagonist." The hero has to be heroic, and you can't be heroic on a fracking computer monitor. There is no "bad guy," just some acronyms. Check out how James Cameron's The Terminator got around the problem of basing a movie on scientific mumbo-jumbo.

The trailer doesn't do the movie any favours either. It bears a remarkable similarity to the recent Stephenie Meyer stinker (now there's a tautology) The Host.

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