Transcendence is a 2014 American science fiction thriller film directed by Wally Pfister (in his directorial debut) and written by Jack Paglen.
The film stars Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Kate Mara, Cillian Murphy and Cole Hauser, and follows a group of scientists who race to finish an artificial intelligence project while being targeted by a radical anti-technology organization.
The film received mainly negative reviews; it was criticized for its plot structure, characters and dialogue but praised for its cinematography, acting, and score.
His best friend and fellow researcher, Max Waters, questions the wisdom of this choice, reasoning that the "uploaded" Will would only be an imitation of the real person.
Will's consciousness survives his body's death in this technological form and requests to be connected to the Internet to grow in capability and knowledge.
However, Evelyn grows fearful of Will's motives when he displays the ability to remotely connect to and control people's minds after they have been subjected to his nanoparticles.
After visiting Evelyn and the underground facility Will has built, and seeing the capabilities of the hybrids Will has created, FBI agent Donald Buchanan and government scientist Joseph Tagger become suspicious of Will's motives and plan to stop the sentient entity from spreading, with help from the government and R.I.F.T.
This would also disable the nano-particles, which have spread in the water, through the wind and have already started to eradicate pollution, disease, and human mortality.
When Evelyn goes back to the research center, she is stunned to see Will in a newly created organic body identical to his old one.
Upon closer examination, he notices that a drop of water falling from a sunflower petal instantly cleanses a puddle of oil — and realizes that the Faraday cage around the garden has protected a sample of Will's sentient nano-particles.
[10] The Hollywood Reporter said Depp would have "a mammoth payday" with a salary of $20 million versus 15 percent of the film's gross.
[12] By the following April, actors Paul Bettany, Kate Mara and Morgan Freeman joined the main cast.
The song "Genesis" from the solo album "Quah" by Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen is prominently featured in the film.
The critics consensus reads: "In his directorial debut, ace cinematographer Wally Pfister remains a distinctive visual stylist, but Transcendence's thought-provoking themes exceed the movie's narrative grasp.
[39][40] Michael Atkinson of Sight & Sound identified "vast plot holes and superhuman leaps of logic", writing that "[f]or all its gloss, hipster pretensions, plot craters and sometimes risible attempts at action, Transcendence traffics in large, troublesome ideas about Right Now and What’s Ahead, even if the film itself is far too timid and compromised to do those hairy questions justice".
[41] William Thomas of Empire believed that the cast and director had been "wasted on a B-Movie script with pretensions of prescience", dismissing the film as a "banal sci-fi slog"; he awarded it a 2 out of 5 star "poor" rating.
[42] David Denby of The New Yorker considered the film to be "rhythmless and shapeless" with "some very cheesy and even amateurish fighting".
[43] Nigel Floyd of Film4 concluded that it was "[a]n ambitious, old fashioned, ideas-driven science fiction film that is never as mind-expanding as its futuristic images and topical, dystopian ideas seem to promise".
"But where the director of Inception knows how to do it with intelligence and cunning, Pfister gets tangled up in his own mysteries, leading us to dead ends in the plot, creating frustration and not just curiosity."
If many have complained of the actor's excessive expressiveness, with characters in the style of Jack Sparrow, in Transcendence he offers the exact opposite, which isn't good either.
"[47] Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times was also positive towards the film, praising the quality of the cast and intelligence of the script.