Johnny Depp plays a man who becomes the world’s first post-human in Transcendence . It’s not the smartest movie about the singularity, but it does bring up all kinds of fears people have about what technology has in store for humanity.
Peter Mountain / Alcon Entertainment
Transcendence is about how Johnny Depp's character tries to destroy the world with technology. Or maybe it's about how he tries to save it. Even at the end, the point's debatable and (literally) muddy, though by then, the planet's been thoroughly Revolution'ed, and people are bartering for goods and littering the sidewalk with their now useless smartphones — technology has lost, and the trans-humanists are largely out of luck.
Before flashing back five years to reveal how everyone ended up in this situation, Transcendence opens with Max Waters (Paul Bettany) walking past store owners who are propping doors open with scrapped keyboards in a dystopian Berkeley, Calif., while he muses about how the internet was supposed to bring everyone closer, but that the world actually feels smaller without it. Transcendence is a mostly silly movie about some very big ideas, but it does feel unexpectedly resonant in how actively conflicted it is about how technology is shaping humanity, and that it can't be controlled, just accepted or rejected wholesale.
Peter Mountain/Alcon Entertainment
In Transcendence, which is the directorial debut of cinematographer and frequent Christopher Nolan collaborator Wally Pfister, Depp plays Will Caster, one of the leading minds in the scientific race toward creating artificial intelligence. He's married to the equally brilliant Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), and the two specialize in neural engineering — until Will is shot by a member of a Neo-Luddite terrorist group led by Bree (Kate Mara) called RIFT, part of a coordinated attack on AI researchers around the country.
Dying from radiation poisoning, Will allows Evelyn and their friend Max to attempt to upload his consciousness to a computer using new data from a colleague who was killed. In an abandoned school gymnasium, he gets his synapses scanned and reads words to a camera, and what results, as he passes, is a seemingly sentient copy of the dead man's mind asking for more power and to be put online. Evelyn's overjoyed, but Max has doubts as to whether what they've created is actually Will or something more ominous.
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