Although I've never done a movie review before, I don't be giving those numerical scores to movies because it's kind of silly to me. I mean, if you have a number scale it should be universal but this kind of material is subjective - so scores are also out of the question here.
What I really liked about Transcendence was that it was very though provoking. It wasn't like a I am Robot, saying that technology will be the bane of human existence. Its message was more like, "If you get too focused on fixing the world with technology, you miss out on a lot in life." This was evident because technology was very prevalent and was used throughout the beginning of the movie. When Dr.Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is uploaded into the computer, he eventually makes amazing advances in technology. It seems like Caster is altruistic and things should be fine until the other characters realize that the healed people basically have Caster uploaded into their brains. Apparently others cannot think for themselves or it is inefficient to do something like that if "advances" are to be made. However these "advances" were in name only because the healed people, who controlled by Caster, were not conscious that they were healed. In the somewhat tragic downfall of the uploaded Caster, Caster makes himself a body so he could be with Evelyn, his wife but he is finally shut off by the virus nanobots that Evelyn has. All of the movie events Caster was in seemed like a waste when he was trying to make Evelyn happy but in almost all the wrong ways possible ways.
There was one thing I didn't get: why Dr. Will Caster had to look like a hipster. Well, that was when Caster had his glasses on. That probably bugged the frick out of my friend (since he made an incensed comment about how horrible Peter Parker looked in The Amazing Spider Man 2 with a hipster hairdo). If they think that the hipster look made Caster smart, the movie people were wrong. Hipsters are known to have vanity issues or identity complexes ... now that I'm thinking about it, the hipster look does fit Caster because of that.
I just looked at the ratings for Transcendence and there were pretty low... 3/5 star rating low. I could see why - it did have a lot of logical problems. For instance, Caster at one point in the movie knew that the anti-tech people were trying to implant a computer virus. Yet at the end, Caster lets Evelyn into the super computer place and heals her, which lets the virus inside Evelyn into Caster and end him. (I just realized that angry critics could use this as a STD joke.) There was that kind of little things that would make this movie perfect for counting "movie sins" in another YouTube episode of "Everything Wrong with Transcendence."
An interesting not is that this movie is difficult for those religiously conservative people, especially of a monotheistic religion, to get very upset about the movie's content. The movie, in my perspective, didn't encourage people to value technology over personal worth or anything like that. I thought the movie had more of an attitude of: "You can have as much technology as you want but feel very empty inside of yourself."
Despite all of this, this was a good movie that would have lots of good discussion topics dealing with advances in technology vs. human nature and things like that.
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Image credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transcendence2014Poster.jpg
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