Transcendence movie review & film summary (2014)

The landscape keeps being destroyed and reassembled, driving home the notion that as humankind evolves into a machine-human hybrid, all reality will become virtual, as easy to create, alter or erase as data on a hard drive. There's a constant undertone of anxiety about the possibility that human flesh is becoming as outdated as last year's iPhone. There's a longing for what Seth Brundle, the Frankenstein-like hero of David Cronenberg's "The Fly", called "the poetry of steak"—that intangible, miraculous something that makes humanity human.

If only "Transcendence" could get a handle on its attitude toward all of this. It's fine to want to explore and just sort of kick ideas around. Too often, though, the movie doesn't feel ambiguous or complicated, merely muddled and wishy-washy. It doesn't want to make Will, or Will 2.0, into a flat-out bad guy, a threat that has to be neutralized, and it doesn't want to scapegoat Evelyn, either, even though she's responsible for the digital re-creation of Will and seems to have a touch of Dr. Frankenstein herself. (This movie could have been called "Bride of Frankenstein," as in "The Doctor's Wife.") 

The movie wants to warn us about the perils of playing God and of technological overreach, and it wants to concentrate those fears in one or two people for the sake of dramatic conflict; but by making this choice, it ignores the fact that in life, it's not one or two brilliant, irresponsible people actively doing things that eradicate privacy and alter reality: it's a sort of passive acceptance that eventually becomes adaptation, or evolution. Other people don't re-wire our brains, it just happens as we live more of our lives online. The problem isn't that some disturbed individuals want to turn us into machines against our will (ahem), it's that we don't have enough will to resist becoming more machinelike. We're slaves to convenience. Yes, you too. Just look at you right now, reading this on your computer, or your handheld phone, maybe in bed. 

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