Transcendence (M)
Starring: Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany
“THEY say there’s power in Chicago … some phone service in Denver … but the world is not what it was.”
Transcendence, a haunting film on many levels, opens with those words on the streets of Berkeley, California.
Armed soldiers patrol the rubbish-strewn and silent streets: there’s a sense of martial law.
Smashed smartphones lie in the gutter: a broken laptop is used to prop open a shop door.
The high-tech centre of the world has been switched off.
And so we enter the man meets tech, nightmare world of Transcendence, a film packed with more ideas than any five other movies on the big screen at the moment.
Johnny Depp stars as Will Caster, possibly the world’s leading expert in artificial intelligence.
Attacked and ultimately murdered by a kind of anti-technological Taliban, Caster’s mind is downloaded onto the internet and becomes his own god.
This intelligence is all-knowing and all-powerful, joining together all the dots of every skerrick of knowledge assembled in human history.
What couldn’t it do, and what couldn’t it become … and who could hope to stop it? And is it really Will in there, or has it become something else?
The anti-tech terrorists soon find themselves joining the government and scientists to fight the new menace – but how can they win?
Rebecca Hall plays Caster’s wife, Evelyn, adding a love story to the mix, while Paul Bettany as a computer scientist provides the film’s moral centre.
With themes of identity, individuality, religion, morality, government, technology and abuse of power , this is one for every thinking luddite and non-luddite.
Within most of our lifetimes, the clever boys will build a machine that is smarter than us – and what happens then?
Me, I’m putting everything I’ve got into canned food and shotguns.
– Jason Beck
