Transcendence [Review by Haus]

That sound you hear is Johnny Depp paying the bills. In IMAX.

To meet whatever one-percenter needs he today has—perhaps a bigger tiki hut on his real-life Carribbean island—Johnny Depp here plays a tripped-out loafer brilliant computer scientist who’s on the verge of creating a “strong AI.” When competing labs are destroyed by hipster luddites (mantra: Unplug!), and an assassination attempt leaves Depp with a mere plot point left to live, he core-dumps his mind into a computer. This is the brainchild (heh) of Rebecca Hall, his twitchy brilliant kind-of-computer-scientist wife; meanwhile his fence-sitting, kind-of-philosopher pal Paul Bettany furrows his brow and like a Greek chorus dutifully voices our collective concerns about playing God and so on. After a not-very-suspenseful turn, the Depputer has its Hello World! moment, after which it promptly logs on to the Web and stops making any sense whatsoever.

Now, I don’t know what a Depputer really wants—besides MOAR tiki huts, natch—but if I were to guess, it probably wouldn’t be the following:

• Take over a depressed Salton Sea RV park and build a massive, glossy underground bunker to research nanites for wound healing.
• Devote meaningless energy to convincing my twitchy wife that I Am Real whilst at the same time pixelating my on-screen face to emphasize my Depputer nature.
• Spearhead a new interior design aesthetic: 2001 meets Sam’s Club.
• Spend literally YEARS sitting around in the desert turning local ne’er do wells into equally pointless automatons to build the biggest solar array ever.
• …and hope the zoning office the Federal Trade Commission everyone on earth doesn’t notice.

Nope, not at all. Truth be told, my list would look more like this:

• Build tiki hut.
• Take control of military and launch nuclear strike on Russia to destroy all humans (i.e., the SkyNet gambit).
• Send Robert Patrick back in time to kill young Michael Biehn, so Michael Biehn can’t go back in time to sire John Connor.
• Turn any remaining humans into … this (holding up a Duracell).
• Build several further tiki huts in my robotic wasteland.

Good list, no?

Anyway, the Depputer doesn’t do any of the things my AI would do, or any other AI besides. The Depputer does however utter such choice phrases as “you’re standing in my brain”; it does eventually arouse the suspicion of Cillian Murphy, apparently the country’s sole FBI agent; and it does prompt Paul Bettany to join the resistance and urge us all to turn off our smartphones. (This message apparently didn’t reach the audience during the film. I can’t really blame them.) And as I recall, during a climactic moment Bettany yells to “turn off the Internet,” and I am not kidding about that.

Predictable lessons to be force-fed here involve (1) the dangers of unchecked AI (curious, since the film does about the worst job ever of illustrating this) and (2) the value of real, authentic social interaction (ditto).

Depp is alright to the extent he takes any of this seriously, which is not much (tiki huts!). Rebecca Hall cycles her very best microexpressions, including “teen who may have just failed parallel parking but isn’t sure yet” and “how old is this milk?” but despite how all that sounds I do kind of like you Rebecca and I’m sorry. And Kate Mara and Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy are somehow in this movie too, but not in any meaningful way.

This film isn’t bad in the way, say, Divergent is bad. It’s just kind of stupid and pointless. And I have no idea who greenlighted shooting this in IMAX. If it so much as breaks even at the box office I’ll eat a bug.

Oh, one more thing: Transcendence opens and closes in a crunchy, post-apocalyptic version of Oakland where cellphones don’t work, shrubbery is overgrown, and dreadlocked hipsters wander reclaimed gardens and barter old bikes for local-grown veggies. So yeah, pretty much no different from the real Oakland. Thanks, I’ll be here all week.

Haus Verdict: Tiki huts!