Transcendence

Dustin: 3 of 5 stars Nick: 3 of 5 stars Average: 3 of 5 stars (Woozy canary)

Dustin: Transcendence is the first film directed by Wally Pfister, the masterful cinematographer behind The Dark Knight and Inception. It stars Johnny Depp as HAL 9000, Rebecca Hall as his wife and Morgan Freeman phoning in his performance (see Figure 1, below).

Figure 1

It’s set in a near future when artificial intelligence is almost an artificial reality. Will (Depp), a dying genius programmer, has his wife upload his memory into a computer. The program becomes super intelligent, but retains a human personality. To the surprise of no one who’s ever seen 2001, Alien, The Terminator or The Matrix, this turns out to be a bad idea.

Nick: Transcendence has all the great ideas and poor execution that most science fiction films have today. The general concept is fascinating, but is eventually ruined by radiation bullets, superpowered lackeys, and smart people making the most unfortunate of decisions.

Dustin: Let’s just hope radiation bullets never become a real thing, imagine if they made something like that that could also pierce armor.

In Red Letter Media’s review of Her, they said a lesser filmmaker would be tempted to have the artificially intelligent operating system go out of control and start destroying everything, and humanity would have to stop it, and it would become a big, loud, dumb action movie. I think that pretty much describes Transcendence. Transcendence is like Her as written by Michael Crichton.

Nick: The most disturbing thing is when the government agrees to team with the terrorist group, R.I.F.T., in order to stop Will. We are never told exactly why the terrorists tried to kill Will at the beginning, but they of course do. Then when all of Will’s friends meet the terrorists responsible, none of them bring up or even emotionally react to the terrorists. His best friend meets the woman soon after Will’s death, but never asks why?

Dustin: I also agree they got too cozy with the terrorists too easily. They might have been right in trying to stop Will after the computer program version of him tried to take over the world, but it seems like after someone shot my best friend, I wouldn’t ever give them a second chance.

Nick: But before they kill him, that wasn’t Will’s intention. So the terrorists are the real cause of all of this. Will caused action, terrorists react, Evelyn starts to act, and then the whole world reacts. Also, the fact that our main characters’ names are Will and Eve(lyn) should let you know that like The Matrix, there are a lot of Biblical allegories.

Dustin: That’s a good point about Will’s original intention, which was never to change the world. They hinted it was Evelyn’s dream to change the world. It’s also worth pointing out Evelyn is the one who uploaded Will into the computer program while Will just lay there dying. How much of what happened was really Evelyn’s subconscious desires? Was the AI Will just Eve’s creation? They hinted at this in the movie, but it wasn’t really explored, and that would have made for a more interesting movie.

The movie has elements from Frankenstein (man playing God), 2001: A Space Odyssey (AI destroying man), Her (romance between a human and AI), the Bible, and Michael Crichton’s Prey (nanobots). I felt a lot like I’d seen all this before and could figure out where it was going. Instead of exploring one interesting theme, it seemed like they were just throwing a lot of things at the wall and seeing what would stick.

Nick: On Rotten Tomatoes, one reviewer’s blurb decried Her for not being as complicated as Transcendence. Her only asked one question thoroughly, while Transcendence tried to make many points poorly. Her wasn’t trying to be overly ambitious, it was a simple story with a high-minded idea. In Transcendence it seems as if all they do is say “technology” and how much power it has instead of explaining how this power goes towards helping anything. Nanotechnology, RAM, hard drive, processor, oh, and NANOTECHNOLOGY!!!!!

Dustin: The movie used a lot of computer lingo and figured the audience wouldn’t understand it. The audience would just know enough to guess this is computer stuff and it’s important to the plot. Maybe it was realistic. It doesn’t really matter. But it did seem cliched. I imagine not all hackers type super fast and are 100 percent focused 100 percent of the time. They showed Morgan Freeman’s office, and all the hackers were doing programming and hacking stuff, typing super fast. In real life, I imagine some of them would be on Facebook, or typing at a normal pace, since it is hard to keep that up for eight hours a day. Then the computers explode because hacking. Must’ve been the same hackers from Live Free or Die Hard--another realistic portrayal of the capabilities of hacking.

Nick: From what I’ve read about nanotechnology, it could not come close to making humans into superhumans. What lacks here compared to a Christopher Nolan film is feeling and comedy. There is one single line in the film that made me crack a smile, but the line was delivered to the wrong person. Johnny Depp says that it’s amusing that anti-technological and peace-loving terrorists use technology (with radiation) and harm in order to carry out their “will.” This is said to Paul Bettany, while I would have preferred it to have been Kate Mara (lead terrorist), so I could just gather what it is they want and why.

Dustin: This movie could have used a little humor. One reviewer, Matt Zoller Seitz, criticised Depp’s performance for being too flat, but I think that was an artistic decision by Depp or the director to make him seem more robotic. But it certainly didn’t bring much joy to the movie.

Having said all that, I still think this movie wasn’t as bad as the Rotten Tomatoes aggregate would have you believe. It was well-made, well-acted, and you could tell the people involved were really trying. I just think as a movie trying to make a thought-provoking statement, it sort of fell flat. As an action movie with cool explosions and special effects, it worked.

Nick: I’m a big fan of Rotten Tomatoes, but I’m a little tired of people misreading the information. The 19 percent (as of this writing) on Transcendence is an aggregate scored based purely on whether or not the critic liked the movie. So one out of every five critics enjoyed the movie. But right under the large 19 percent is the average score of the actual ratings given by those critics. That stands at 4.6 out of 10. Not nearly as bad. My brother wouldn’t go see the movie because of that LARGE 19%. This movie obviously cared about what it was trying to do, and that is always worth more than seeing a shitty film doing mediocre work that will be forgotten within the next year until it makes its appearance on Netflix.

Dustin: On a related note, Adam Sandler’s Jack and Jill has a 3 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, but an average rating of 2.6 out of 10.

Nick: Paul Bettany and Rebecca Hall were as good as they could be with the script they were given. Bettany is someone who is always entertaining. There is another movie coming out next week, The Machine, that has a very similar plot, but its an indie film, so don’t expect a two-hour runtime and explosions. Transcendence also made a gigantic misstep when it starts its story with the ending. This might work with dramas (American Beauty), but it’s poorly placed in a film where the obvious is made to be even more obvious.

Dustin: I agree. Note to aspiring suspense writers: Don’t tell your story in flashback, it takes away the suspense.

Overall, I’d recommend this purely as an action film, but not as a thought-provoking cautionary tale on the perils of technology.

Noah

Dustin: 4 of 5 stars Nick: 3.5 of 5 stars Average: 3.75 of 5 stars (Live canary)

Dustin: Noah is a 2-hour 19-minute movie based on less than 10 pages of the Bible. It stars Russell Crowe and his boat “making movies, making music and fighting ‘round the world”--this time in Iceland, which is the film’s stand-in for the ancient Near East.

Noah is set in a world so overcome by wickedness God chooses to wipe out creation with a flood. However, he sees goodness in a righteous man named Noah (Crowe), and chooses Noah to build an ark in which a male and female of every species will ride out the storm and repopulate the world once the flood is over. In the end *SPOILERS* Noah and his family survive the flood.

Dustin: So what did you think of Noah?

Nick: Very entertaining, even with the dramatics of a soap opera.

Dustin: What do you mean by “dramatics of a soap opera”?

Nick: The story that is created by the writers often falls into camp territory. Noah’s son Ham goes into town and ends up wanting to save a girl he just met, and Noah would not let that happen. This makes Ham brood and plot against his father for most of the film. Then his eldest son Shem gets his adopted sister pregnant, and Noah will kill the child if it is born a girl. The script also adds a character from another part of the Bible named Kubal-Cain. He is the antithesis to Noah and plots with Ham to have him killed. All the while his wife supports him until it comes to Noah slaughtering her future grandkid, though all the other children he left to drown was understandable given that his message came from “the Creator.”

Dustin: What would you say to the critics who say this movie isn’t true to the Bible, which they interpret as a 100 percent accurate depiction of historical events?

Nick: They need to separate their religion from a movie based on a small portion of a very large spiritual text. The story of Noah’s Ark and other incantations are not packed with depth. It’s up to the creators (ha, “creators”) to fill in the gaps and make sense of a story lacking in subtext. I believe Pope Francis approved the movie, which makes me love him all the more. The Pope is either very cool or has an amazing publicist.

Dustin: Most of the people bashing the movie are Fundamentalists who don’t have the ability to separate a movie from the Bible. If it deviates at all from the source material  they’ll call it blasphemous.

Nick: Just like tween lit fans! One very enjoyable thing to do is read the reviews of Noah on IMDb. They are bordering on insanity!

38 people found this review helpful. Think about that for awhile.

Dustin: I particularly enjoyed the visuals in this movie, and consider some sequences works of art. Artists have a long tradition of depicting and interpreting Biblical scenes, and I think moments in this movie can be considered part of that tradition. One particular moment has Noah reciting the story of creation from the book of Genesis, while the images on the screen show the Big Bang and evolution. I imagine this doesn’t go over well with Fundamentalists, but it was very artistic and well done.

Nick: The shots of all Noah’s hallucinations and stories were by far my favorite parts. Cain and Abel’s silhouettes against the backdrop of dawn, a glowing female body reaching for an apple, and the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Dustin: I particularly enjoyed the giant rock monster things. They looked realistic, even though they were obviously CGIs, with expressive, sympathetic faces. I also liked when they started fighting the hordes of humans trying to bum-rush their way onto the ark.

Nick: The giant rock monsters (fallen angels) were entertaining, but also seems to be what both religious and non-religious people point out as one of the many reasons as to why they hated the movie. Seriously, it’s worth seeing Noah just to understand the IMDb user reviews.

Dustin: I wondered if this movie wasn’t a little too strange for general audiences. I was in an audience with a lot of families. I didn’t really consider it a “family” film. I thought the movie did a good job showing why humanity needed to be wiped out. Humans had devastated the earth’s natural resources and had resorted to cannibalism, taking children from mothers to be eaten. It was creepy on an archetypical level.

Nick: Religious parents often look past that when the film is Biblical based, which will teach their children their favorite tales of morality. Noah definitely has the Darren Aronofsky feel. As you say its very strange, if not twisted.

Dustin: The movie differed from the Bible in some of the details, and I don’t know whether the religious folk are complaining about these. For example, at the end, rather than Noah cursing Ham for seeing him naked and passed out drunk, it made it seem like it was Ham’s choice to leave. This seemed to be more in character for how they were portrayed in the film, but was an important difference, I think.

Nick: One element of the film that could have been better was the dialogue. What ever the characters said seemed to be things that have been explained through visuals or hamfisted in terms of creating emotional scenes (as I talked of before). For me the film would have been better with a little dialogue, which when used correctly can go a long way.

Dustin: I got the feeling they were trying to make the dialogue sound Biblical. It’s not easy to do.

Nick: The dialogue seemed a mix between Biblical, Shakespearean, English theater and poor TV drama. The acting was good, but beyond Russel Crowe, non-famous actors would have been a plus. I kept seeing Hermione Granger and Percy Jackson. This didn’t happen when these two stars were together in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but I couldn’t escape their blockbuster characters during this film.

Dustin: I think this is a good movie for the artsy crowd. If you know you’ll be offended by it, just skip it, because nothing is going to change your mind. I think it is too intense for young children, so I wouldn’t recommend Christian families making a family outing out of this. I also think it is too strange for your average movie-goer. But with it being a big-budget movie, it needs those audiences.