Transcendence | 2/5

SINGAPORE — For a film produced by Christopher Nolan, directed by Inception cinematographer Wally Pfister and starring Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman and Rebecca Hall, Transcendence is decidedly... blah.

Depp plays Dr Will Caster, a top researcher in the field of artificial intelligence who is working to create a sentient machine that is armed with all the knowledge of the world as well as the emotional capacity of a human being. When anti-technology extremists try to stop him, his wife Evelyn Caster (Hall) and friend Max (Paul Bettany) decide to upload Will’s consciousness into this machine, in an effort to save his life. But as Will’s machine grows increasingly more powerful, Evelyn and Sam begin to wonder if they have made a mistake.

To be fair, the film does pose an important, if unoriginal, question: When it comes to technology, how far is too far? Unfortunately, Transcendence, which happens to be Pfister’s directorial debut, fails to keep us interested in what it actually has to say about the subject.

The film begins slowly, with Max introducing us to a world where the Internet has been shut down all around, in efforts to combat Will’s domination. The pace never quite picks up throughout the movie, apart from some more exciting moments where we find out what happens to Will. And it doesn’t exactly help that the cast is one-note throughout the film.

Maybe one day, the world will be destroyed by a sentient robot that looks and sounds like Johnny Depp. But hopefully when that day comes, we will actually be awake to see it happen.

(PG, 119 mins)