MOVIE REVIEW - Transcendence

Johnny Depp and Rebecca Hall star in the new computer movie, Transcendence.

Can we please stop making movies about computers? Computer viruses? And computer moguls, and big wigs?   They have notoriously been panned, and no one wants to go see them. Even if Johnny Depp is in one.

This is the story of a brilliant Doctor of Engineering (Depp) and his wife (Hall), and their quest to invent Artificial Intelligence in theory, to benefit all of mankind.  Quickly I will tell you, that the good doctor is killed by an anti-tech group who are out to derail his efforts.  As he is dying, his grieving wife and their other doctor friend find a way to load the dying man's conscience into a computer.  After they do that, his wife puts his being online, and everything hits the fan.

He is able to access all computers in the world and have a collective intelligence that is more powerful than everyone else in the world combined.  He starts riping off banks, and every computer network on earth. He then, with his wife's help, build this gigantic computer center in the desert, and begin to engineer a breed of humans called "hybrids" that have super human powers.  And now the only way he can be stopped is to upload a virus, onto the Internet that will result in the entire Internet being shut down world wide. That of course, causes catastrophic consequences.  So what will happen?

And the answer is, who cares?  My goodness is this bad.  This is not a bunch different than the rest of these horrible computer movies.  The 5th Estate, Jobs, The Social Network, and others are just flat out boring, and amazingly non-compelling.   Computers are a huge part of our lives.  I'm on one now, but the whole thing makes for horrible movie making.  People just don't want to watch others type, look at screens, and talk computer speak for 2 hours. Too much like work. 

This has a nice cast with Depp, and Hall, and they drug Morgan Freeman into this quagmire, and somehow, he said yes.  But this is just bad.  Really bad.  And this flopped badly last weekend, which now make two flops in a row for Depp (The Lone Ranger), and as good as he can be, he is in the dark side of his career. He needs a hit soon.

Transcendence.  See anything but this.