Since the Industrial Revolution, a succession of mechanical
innovations represents the ambiguous gifts of progress: the power looms of the
early 19th century, the locomotive later in the same century, the automobile
for most of the 20th century, and the computer in our own time. Beginning with “Colossus: The Forbin Project” back in 1970, a number of movies deal with
the menace of a sentient computer — “Demon Seed,” “Westworld,”
for example, and most famously, Stanley Kubrick’s “2001.” Now “Transcendence”
takes the concept further, suggesting a new dynamic between mechanism and
mankind.
The picture begins in Berkeley, Calif., showing a shabby
street patrolled by armed soldiers, with vegetation sprouting from cracks in
sidewalks and buildings, and a shopkeeper using a laptop to prop open his door.
Prose on the screen then announces a flashback to five years earlier, showing a
sequence in which a brilliant computer scientist, Will Caster (Johnny Depp),
explains to an adoring audience his creation of a computer that can cure
diseases, end poverty and hunger, and establish a new, peaceful world.
Immediately after his presentation an organization of violent Luddites whose
motto is “Evolution Without Technology” attacks his laboratory, killing workers
and blowing up computers full of information; worse, one of the group shoots
Caster with a poisoned bullet, a wound that will kill him in a month.
Caster persuades his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and his
partners (Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman) to
undertake a daring procedure, transferring the contents of his brain via
electrodes to his supercomputer so that he can live on and complete his
invention. Naturally, the experiment succeeds, and Caster achieves the
transcendence of the title, entering the computer itself and overseeing the
construction of an enormous array of electronics in the middle of a desolate
prairie; from there he can control the future according to his vision.Â
After a good deal of talky exposition and a number of scenes
showing the fulfillment of Caster’s plans, the scheme unsurprisingly turns
sinister. When his computers apparently start repairing DNA and thus curing the
lame, the sick, and the blind, they also turn the patients into the scientist’s
minions, a circumstance that forces the action into something like warfare. The
group of Eco terrorists, along with the government and Caster’s former
colleagues, stage some failed armed assaults on his gigantic computer compound,
finally deciding on an ingenious solution to the problem that, like Caster’s
creation, appropriately combines the necessary elements of the human and the
mechanical.
After its intriguing beginning and despite its exploitation
of some fascinating concepts, the picture grows increasingly confused and
confusing and Caster’s ideas grow fuzzier as his computer self becomes more
defined and powerful. Though opposed to technology and in favor of natural
process, the Luddite group, for example, practices some shocking brutality and
employs a considerable array of mechanisms to achieve their goals. The slow pace of most of its plot suddenly
explodes into the sort of bombing and shooting that usually appears in the familiar
comic book blockbusters rather than an ambitiously cerebral science fiction
flick.
In the great tradition of its form, however, the film
continues not only the long history of cultural ambivalence about technological
progress, which needn’t constitute a simple Luddite hostility, but also
celebrates the grand character of our old friend, the Mad Scientist. Will
Caster descends in his hubristic way from all those great creative rebels of
myth and literature who break the rules, commit the forbidden deed, and
transcend indeed their original state — Prometheus, Faust, and of course,
Victor Frankenstein.Â
With his slow, flat, careful diction, and an unwavering
composure whatever the circumstances, Johnny Depp never displays anything like
the kind of hysteria that so often afflicts the scientists of literature and
cinema, but his dreams, like theirs, suggest an overreaching ambition that
almost inevitably results in disaster. Whatever their tone or their outcome,
pictures like “Transcendence” also indicate more than the ambiguity of
technological progress; they hint at the widespread distrust of intelligence
and learning in the culture at large, where pressure groups prevent the showing
of films on evolution or the history of the universe, and political figures
spout unimaginable ignorance to their constituents; not every scientist, after
all, is a Mad Scientist.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2014.
