Warning: Spoilers for Transcendence lie in wait.

Tasha: Scott, when I first saw the Transcendence trailer, I thought, “Oh, they’ve rebooted the technological-paranoia movie yet again. Here we go with one more case of a story made by people who don’t really understand present scientific developments, but are pretty sure there’s some dumb, ill-justified way they could run amuck and kill us all.” I went to see it hoping I was wrong, but man, did this movie feel familiar to me. The critics surrounding me at the screening were all muttering about 1970’s Colossus: The Forbin Project when it was over, and certainly the parallels are there: This film is very much in keeping with the kind of technological-paranoia thrillers that keep coming up in Keith Phipps’ Laser Age column—for instance, the extremely pertinent most recent installment, “When computers take control, humanity risks deletion.” But it’s also in keeping with soft-science-fiction fear films from every decade. I saw just as much DNA from Hollow Man and The Net and Splice in this movie as I saw traces of more classic paranoia films like Forbin Project.

The movie in extreme brief, for readers’ sake: Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is some sort of vaguely defined futurist working at a high level in the field of artificial intelligence. He’s targeted by a neo-Luddite group led by a woman named Bree (House Of Cards’ Kate Mara); when he’s shot, his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and friend Max (Paul Bettany), with a little unwitting assistance from fellow traveler Joseph Tagger (Morgan Freeman), upload his consciousness into a computer. From there, he starts rapidly expanding in power and scope, until he has the ability—and maybe the desire?—to take over the world. The usual questions apply: Can he be stopped? If not, what will a computer do, given the power to wipe out messy, flawed humanity and rebuild the species in its own image?

Scott, two questions: Do you find these questions, which come up so often in various forms in paranoia-driven films, to be compelling in their own right? More specifically, did you find them compelling here?

Scott: Answer to question one: Absolutely. There’s no movie subject I find more fascinating than man’s relationship with technology, because when it’s done right, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or more recently, Computer Chess or Her, it can say so much about the times in which we live, and our anxieties about the future. And when it’s done wrong, it’s equally fascinating as a document of our unfounded hysteria and cluelessness about what such advancements might mean. Which leads me to question two: I did not find Transcendence remotely convincing about the Singularity and its implications—partly because it spends too much time hitting the panic button, but mostly because its idea of where we might be headed seemed so completely off to me. Granted, how the Singularity might transform organic life as we know it can be hard to fathom, but having Johnny Depp reborn as a creepy Max Headroom-type who monitors his wife’s biochemistry and forms an army of super-strong human/robot drone hybrids seems pretty damned far off the mark. 

The one intriguing aspect of the film is that it ultimately doesn’t have any villains. When the neo-Luddite group sets off a timed attack against Will and various computer labs across the country, they seem like the bad guys, but we come to understand their genuine desire to save the human race from technological intrusion—if not obsolescence. Evelyn, who initially follows her talking-head AI-husband as he gains power, eventually comes to see the threat he represents. At the same time, the film seems to appreciate the potential for Will to “heal the planet” via weird black-tendril thingies, and while it’s wary of technological demagoguery, it could be beneficial. Or could it? By the end, I wasn’t so sure where the film stood with regard to such advancements, and I left feeling that it was more confused than ambiguous. Am I missing something, Tasha? 

Tasha: I don’t think you’re missing anything when it comes to seeing the film as more muddled than cleverly ambiguous, especially in the final moments, where it pulls out a “Surprise!” without taking time to explore or justify what that surprise means. If anything, I liked the film less than you did. I don’t see it as lacking villains—if anything, everyone in this film is a villain, starting with Bree’s group RIFT, which starts the film by slaughtering dozens of people to stop them from science-ing in a field RIFT doesn’t approve of. Their shooting Will in the first place causes the rest of the plot to happen; in a Batman-creating-the-Joker kind of way, their attempts to stop a problem end with them inventing their own nemesis. Then they kidnap Max and keep him locked in a chicken coop for months until he, without comment, joins their side, without ever confronting them about murdering his friend, setting the end of the world in motion, or even—but wait, what have you done against me lately?—kidnapping him and keeping him in a chicken coop for months.

There’s plenty of narrative tension in a situation so dire that it forces someone to work with his worst enemies, but no one ever addresses the conflict there; it’s a tremendous waste of an opportunity to let Max and Bree examine and clarify their beliefs, and to give this film a theme besides “Technology scary.” Then there’s Evelyn, this year’s winner of the Splice Commemorative Women Are Too Danged Emotional To Be Scientists Award; she’s so caught up in hoping her husband is the new god in the machine that she ignores every possible warning sign over the course of years on the way to the AI Revolution, and screams at poor picked-on Max when he tries to make her think like a scientist instead of a bad plot device. Even Robo-Will is part of the villain roster. Despite the “Let’s have it both ways” ending—which again, isn’t developed enough to clarify what the film is trying to do—he’s still an all-powerful, controlling force that’s creating an army of stolen hybrid human bodies that can’t live without him.

My major complaint against Transcendence is how it doesn’t seem to think through any of its ideas, relationships, or developments. I never got a sense for who Max or Bree or Joseph were, or why they made the choices they did. In a film that’s so centered on big decisions—to murder for a belief, to pioneer a new scientific development, to change the world, to sacrifice the world, to commit suicide—that’s an unsurmountable problem. So you can probably guess what kind of techno-paranoia thriller I like: The ones that stop to examine why we develop new technologies in the first place, and what drives us to put them in the specific forms they’re in. Better yet, when things go wrong, they examine why things went wrong, and consider how we can do better. Basically, the techno-paranoia movies I enjoy generally aren’t about why technology is scary, they’re about how people always misuse it. I have some examples, but let’s hear your thoughts on the abstract end first: What works for you in a techno-thriller?

Scott: First off, you make a good point about everyone being villains in this film, though I think that argument has more to do with bad results than evil intent per se. By shooting Will, RIFT unwittingly serves as a catalyst for the thing they’re trying to stop, which is irony, not villainy. But I think we’ve picked Transcendence’s corpse clean, so I’d like to move on to techno-thrillers done right. One that leaps immediately to mind is Shane Carruth’s Primer, which by its nature cannot have the bells and whistles of a mega-production like Transcendence, because the bulk of its $7,000 budget was burned on buying 16mm film stock. So it becomes all about ideas: The idea of time travel, what its implications and consequences might be, and what that might mean for the future of humanity. It’s not as if Carruth was on the cutting edge of some plausible technology: We’ve been theorizing about time travel for a while without getting anywhere near it becoming a reality. But I don’t know that a film on the subject has been as thoroughly considered, or as disturbing in its conclusions. Even something like Inception—which Transcendence director Wally Pfister worked on as director of photography—feels complex and worked-out in the abstract before all the splashy effects are added. 

On a larger scale, The Matrix works in part because it’s an extension of our technological state—like Transcendence, there’s tyranny in ones and zeroes—but not to the point where it’s guessing about where we might be headed. The idea that society itself is an elaborate construct offers a great, generalized paranoia that stokes our feelings of instability in a rapidly changing, networked world, but it doesn’t ask the audience to accept that as anything more than a fantasy. Can you read The Matrix movies as the Wachowskis issuing a warning about the potential for techno tyranny? Absolutely. But the fact it’s not speculative science fiction rescues it from becoming like Transcendence or The Net, which make paranoia look a lot like cluelessness. 

Tasha: Transcendence’s bones may be already bleaching in the sun of your mind, but I’m still going to take a moment to quirk an eyebrow at your claim that preemptively murdering a bunch of scientists out of some vaguely defined political/religious fear, and shooting an innocent man with a radioactive bullet to poison him to death, is irony rather than villainy. If I ever go postal, that can be my courtroom defense: “It was intended as irony, your honor!”

That aside, I like the idea that the best techno-thrillers are more fantasies than actual warning bells. I’m not sure all my favorites fit that bill, but the original 1954 Godzilla certainly does: I don’t think anyone’s actually afraid nuclear-weapons testing has filled the oceans with mutated monster-lizards, but the idea of one terrorizing Japan lets the filmmakers get into some sophisticated thoughts about whether mankind can handle the weapons they’ve made, especially when the scientist who figures out how to kill Godzilla ponders whether people can handle that technology any better than they handled the technology that caused Godzilla. It’s easy to forget the smart roots of the series that’s mostly given us lots of silly rubber-suit-monster face-offs, but Godzilla is an unusually melancholy, philosophical thriller. (And hey, it’s an upcoming Dissolve Movie Of The Week!) 

I’m also a fan of the many alien-paranoia films of the 1950s and early 1960s, when the space race suddenly turned the culture’s attention to broad, nervous speculation about what horrors might lurk out there in the ether. The Day The Earth Stood Still, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, Village Of The Damned, The Thing From Another World… They all take themselves perhaps a little too seriously, in keeping with the tone of the time, but they’re all creepy, and incisive about tapping into what scares us. And in their way, they’re all designed to make people think about the universe’s possibilities, rather than turning their brains off.

Another thing: It’s been long enough since we were culturally terrified by the weird new idea of space exploration that these movies are a little divorced from their cultural concerns, and it’s easy to just enjoy their aesthetic and narrative values. Whereas I just find films like The Net, Splice, and Transcendence silly, because they’re such nervous Nellies about developments that seem more exciting than frightening to me. Can you relate to today’s paranoia thrillers? Are computers coming to eat our heads? Do you have an opinion on films about past techno-fears vs. modern ones? 

Scott: That’s a really interesting point, Tasha. Though I don’t think we’ll ever stop chuckling at The Net, or the virtual-reality sequences in Disclosure and The Lawnmower Man, there’s something to be said about revisiting these movies decades later, and understanding them in the context of their era. (I’m describing Keith’s Laser Age column here, more or less.) We might think of Transcendence as silly now, but will that be the case 20 or 30 years from now, when cultural anthropologists see it as a valuable reflection of what we were concerned about in 2014? My belief that Transcendence is way off as a piece of speculative fiction makes me suspect that a revival is not in the cards, but even bad techno-paranoia retains some fascination as a cultural artifact. 

As for the past and present of techno-fears, I’m inclined to embrace the period Keith covers in his column, partly because it represents a more thoughtful time in science-fiction filmmaking, and partly because threats like artificial intelligence, cloning, or super-computers existed mostly in the abstract, and not in various stages of actual development. For one, you can’t really scoff at technology that doesn’t exist in any form yet, like you can with Johnny Depp’s floating head in Transcendence. With something like HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we’re confronted very starkly and powerfully with the idea that an artificial being that we’ve created can outsmart and turn against us. But now that technology has advanced, the same essential conflict in Transcendence is mucked up in superfluous (or just plain silly) details, like super-strong human/computer hybrids, or the presence of tech DNA in a drop of water. It distracts from core issues that are still important. 

Tasha: Those core issues, in so many of these films, from the 1950s to the present, are largely about losing control and losing our humanity, whether it’s because we’ll be consumed by alien pods and turned into emotionless duplicates of ourselves, or because we’ll simply be wiped out by the machines we’ve created. The one thing I’ll give Transcendence is that it does tap into those universal fears in an interesting way: Not with the man who becomes a maybe-unfeeling machine, and not with the boring fight between Machine-Man and the military, but with the rows of sick, disabled, or otherwise damaged people who are perfectly willing to hand themselves over to the unknown when AI-Will suggests he can fix their bodies by filling them with nanobots and inviting them into his hive-mind. I’m annoyed that whole idea wasn’t developed better, in terms of clarifying what he promised them (which would go a long way toward establishing whether he really is a villain, much better than the murky, sentimental ending does) and what made their decision. All-powerful AIs are vaguely scary, but the idea of voluntarily lining up to be processed into something inhuman, because inhuman is better: Now that’s relevant, interesting, and worth getting spooked about.

But for that matter, so is Transcendence’s poorly explained, poorly executed, and barely addressed idea that when the AI’s reign ends, the Internet implodes. I’m still not sure exactly why that happened, but I’m betting that for most first-world denizens of today, the prospect of their electricity, phones, computers, and online world ceasing to exist is much scarier than alien pods, giant lizards, and uploaded men all put together. When do we get the techno-terror film that’s actually about people trying to learn to live without the Internet again?