Transcendence - Like watching a ‘magic eye’ picture

Have you ever looked at one of those ‘magic eye’ pictures?  They’re those pictures made entirely of coloured spot and *supposedly* if you stare at them and relax your eyes in just the right way then you’ll see some magical sort of picture contained within.  Well… Transcendence is a bit like one of those.

I stared at the film for nearly its two-hour runtime and I’m pretty sure there was something magical contained in there somewhere.  I just wasn’t sure of what I’d seen.

For a start (in case you didn’t know) Transcendence wasn’t a commercial success.  Despite it’s a-list cast (think Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman), it wasn’t that well-received.  One reason – that anyone thinking of watching it should know – is that Johnny Depp’s face was used heavily in the film’s marketing.  Therefore, his legions of fans naturally assumed that this was a ‘Johnny Depp film.’ It isn’t.  Not really.  I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to mention that he dies about twenty minutes into the film.  That’s integral to the plot.  For he plays a computer genius who is experimenting with artificial intelligence and, after his death, has his consciousness transferred into a machine.  And, as the saying goes… with disastrous consequences.

So, what little we see (and hear) of Depp is largely his face on a computer screen throughout most of the film.  And that didn’t go down too well with those people who had gone to see the film just because he was in it.

Without wishing to give too much away about the story, I thought it was quite an original idea overall.  It was just executed in a bit of an odd way.  You’re never really sure what sort of film you’re watching.  Yes, it’s heavily sci-fi and there’s a fair amount of ‘romance’ thrown in there between the computerised Johnny Depp and the lady he ‘left behind’ when he died.  Then you have various sub-plots surrounding those who don’t trust this new ‘human-machine-intelligence’ hybrid and have set about bringing it down.  Those scenes are reminiscent of an action movie.  Then there’s the overall ‘dystopian-future disaster movie’ feel to it.  All of this makes it a bit uneven.

If you’ve heard it’s a ‘bad’ movie, then you’ve heard wrong.  It’s not bad.  It’s just not what most people want because it never really settles on one type of genre for long enough to establish itself.  Sci-fi fans will probably get the most out of this as it doesn’t have enough ‘Johnny Depp’ in it to be considered a Johnny Depp movie.  It doesn’t have enough action in it to be considered an ‘action movie’ and it doesn’t have enough romance in it to be considered a ‘romance movie.’  However, no matter what the ingredients are, it’s still quite an interesting, thoughtful movie.  It’s probably not actually as ‘mainstream’ as most people think it’s going to be, so you’ll need your quiet, contemplative head on when you sit down to spend a couple of hours with Johnny Depp’s virtual incarnation.

7/10 if I woke up on Groundhog Day and had to watch this again, I could live with that