Transcendence (2014)

RogerEbert

In Hollywood, the phrase "science fiction film" doesn't usually mean what it should. Most films sold with that designation aren't true science fiction, because they don't deal in ideas in a sustained, conscientious way; they don't extrapolate where we are and where we might be headed, and what it might mean for the human race intellectually, physically and emotionally. More often what you get are action or horror or superhero movies with a faint science fiction flavor—films that occasionally remind themselves to genuflect toward big themes when they aren't just having the characters run and jump and dodge explosions or be surprised by a monster lunging at them from the dark. "Transcendence," about a dying computer genius (Johnny Depp) who uploads himself in computerized form and achieves a problematic digital afterlife, is real science fiction. It explores its ideas with sincerity, curiosity and terrifying beauty (its director is Wally Pfister, longtime cinematographer for Christopher Nolan). This makes its failures all the more depressing. A bad film is just a bad film. A well-intentioned film that reaches for greatness and keeps falling on its face is some kind of minor tragedy.

How much do you want to know about the plot? Since a big part of the film's fascination lies in its unexpected storytelling rhythms, I'll try to restrict myself to elements already divulged in the trailer, even though I resented where the story ended up. Suffice to say that when the tale begins, Depp's character, a Steven Jobs-ian technology guru named Will Caster, has been at the vanguard of artificial intelligence research for some time. He and his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hallof "Iron Man 3") have been trying to create a sentient machine with a personality, perhaps a digital facsimile of a soul, even going so far as to hook a prototype version up to a dying monkey and upload the contents of its brain. Next step: do it with a human. A terrorist organization headed by Kate Mara's Bree engineers a series of strikes against research labs to set the AI research back. They think that creating an omnipotent computer with a human personality is a bad idea. Imagine!

Caster is wounded in the 9/11 style, multi-pronged attack, taking a radiation-laced bullet and dying a few weeks later. And it's at this point—maybe a quarter of the way through the story—that "Trancendence" becomes intriguing. What we've got here isn't just a "Frankenstein"-like parable of scientific hubris run amok, but also the story of a grieving spouse who's reluctant to let go of her mate and tries to prolong his life artificially. The film's script, credited to Jack Paglen, takes its sweet time confirming whether the being uploaded into the neural network Will Caster or merely a digital copy, and if a copy, what sort. 

Will, after all, did not upload himself, and as we all know, when a physical object is destroyed and then reassembled in some other form, it might retain the essence of the original thing, but it is not the same—and its shape and function might be altered, even tainted, by the expectations and agendas of whoever did the reconstructing, as well as by the means of reassembly and the materials used. You may be reminded of the end of Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick's "A.I.", which distinguishes between an actual person and an idealized image of that person. You might also recall W.W. Jacob's short story "The Monkey's Paw."

As the real world merges with the virtual world, will reality become a mere adjunct of the virtual? Are the digital selves we create online truly extensions of us, or do they eventually take on lives of their own? The "Matrix" films, Spike Jonze's "Her" and many other science fiction movies addressed these questions; they're never far from this one's mind, and even when the film fails as drama, it keeps the imagination spinning. Will asks Evelyn to help him refurbish a dying desert town called Brightwood into a research facility that is to develop nanotechnology (machines as small as molecules) to repair and even replace flesh and alter nature. But is it really Will who's doing the asking? When we first meet him, he's a remote and in some ways inscrutable person (Depp's too-reticent performance makes him rather dull, actually), but post-digital conversion he becomes more controlling, building a love nest in which he constantly observes his beloved from computer screens as she pines for him, dines by candlelight, and sleeps. 

"Are we sure it's him?" asks Will's best friend Max (Paul Bettany). "Clearly his mind has evolved so rapidly that I'm not sure it matters anymore," replies another computer genius, Tagger (Morgan Freeman), who fears something horrible is taking shape in the desert. Government forces, including an FBI agent played by Cillian Murphy, were originally allied against the terrorists, but now they're starting to wonder if they were on the wrong side. Brightwood is quite literally a god complex, headquarters for the puppet master Will. He posthumously manipulates reality from the protection of a cyberspace that might as well be his own personal Heaven. 

The script is filled with Biblical allusions, some heavy-handed, others sly. It seems no accident that Brightwood, the place where miracles and seeming plagues occur, is located in the desert, or that the first three letters of Will's wife's name are identical to that of the character who ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in the Book of Genesis. Pfister has thought the story out in terms of resonant images, some of which recur at key points in the story. Nourishing raindrops hide sinister secrets. Nano-bots swarm upward in black clouds like the locusts in "Days of Heaven." The in medias res beginning takes place in a garden where something miraculous has occurred. Scenes start or end with fades to white, as if alluding to four of the most famous words in the Old Testament: "Let there be light." 

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. 

The most galling thing about "Transcendence," though, isn't its inability to get a handle on what, if anything, it wants to say about the enormous changes happening to the human race, it's the movie's ending, which seems calculated to reassure us that everything's going to be fine as long as the right people are in charge, especially if they're good looking. It's precisely that sort of blind acceptance of authority that got the world of "Transcendence" into a big mess in the first place, and that could bring this world, this "real" world, to ruin as well. 

Rotten Tomatoes

Movie Info

Sci-Fi Thriller. Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is the foremost researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence, working to create a sentient machine that combines the collective intelligence of everything ever known with the full range of human emotions. His highly controversial experiments have made him famous, but they have also made him the prime target of anti-technology extremists who will do whatever it takes to stop him. However, in their attempt to destroy Will, they inadvertently become the catalyst for him to succeed-to be a participant in his own transcendence. For his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and best friend Max Waters (Paul Bettany), both fellow researchers, the question is not if they can...but if they should. Their worst fears are realized as Will's thirst for knowledge evolves into a seemingly omnipresent quest for power, to what end is unknown. The only thing that is becoming terrifyingly clear is there may be no way to stop him.(C) Warner

Stranger By the Lake

Rotten Tomatoes

Movie Info

Frank (Pierre Deladonchamps) spends his summer days hopelessly searching for companionship at a popular cruising spot on the shores of a lake in rural France. One day, he meets Michel (Christophe Paou), an attractive yet darkly mysterious man and falls blindly in love. When a death occurs, Frank and Michel become the primary suspects but they choose to ignore the dangers and instead continue to engage in their passionate and potentially lethal relationship. STRANGER BY THE LAKE is an eroticthriller that tests the lengths and limits of sexual desire. (c) Strand

RogerEbert

"Stranger by the Lake" is the sexiest and most elegant thriller in years, and it's a damn shame it stands so little chance of traveling beyond the niche of a "gay film" it will probably get squeezed into. This French movie, written and directed by Alain Guiraudie, is set in a single location and has a dreamy quality to it: a mixture of allure and menace that's quite intoxicating. We never leave a sunny gay cruising area the characters are frequenting—a lake, a beach, a nearby boudoir of bushes—but our imagination is kept alert at all times: every image and every cut is underlined with tension.

The main character is Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), an attractive guy in his thirties regularly enjoying everything the cruising spot has to offer: from a chat to a swim to a tryst. We meet him on the day he strikes up a conversation with Henri (Patrick D'Assumçao), the flabby and gruff lumberjack who may alienate himself from the beach community, but seems open enough to Franck. And while the latter enjoys Henri's company, he falls in love with Michel (Christophe Paou), a sexy and mysterious Tom Selleck lookalike the entire beach is smitten with (he's like a mid-1980s gay centerfold incarnate).

Michel is initially aloof and goes to the bushes with someone else, but the next day he hits on Franck and they have sex. Their chemistry is immediate and palpable, even if Michel doesn't want to hear of committment (which Franck is keen on having). The way the story is set up, it's the unpopular Henri who represents fidelity and emotional attachment, while Michel is pure sex—with a dash of death. [SPOILER IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH]

The evening after their first adventure, Franck witnesses Michel drown another lover picked up on the beach in an extraordinary long shot that's the film's centerpiece. Instead of calling the police, he is drawn more and more towards Michel, even as local police starts an investigation. The unsmiling inspector assigned to the case (Jérôme Chappatte) is faced with a daunting task. He starts gathering information in a place designed for people to lose their official identities and plunge into unbridled desire. A cat-and-mouse game ensues, with Franck becoming literal prey in the final scenes, shot in the dark and more primal in their feel than any of the sexual encounters depicted thus far.

The entire microcosm of the film is highly ritualized: from the looks and gestures signaling erotic interest (or lack thereof) to the way individual characters move and interact. Henri's arms are forever reclusively folded on his chest, the inspector holds his hands behind his back like a cartoon of a detective; and Michel seems forever ready for a photo shoot of his hairy chest and dazzling smile. Nudity may not be obligatory at the beach, but it is both welcome and rampant: I cannot think of any other movie that's so open to naked male bodies and treats them so casually (the whole of the clothing in "Stranger by the Lake" would scarcely fill up one drawer). By immersing us so totally in the workings of the gay beach, Guiraudie avoided the trap of William Friedkin's abysmal "Cruising", which presented its milieu as a freak show. This film appears to have been made by a resident, not a tourist. There's something tremendously liberating in seeing so much gay sexuality set against water, sand, grass and stars in the sky (you can imagine Walt Whitman approving).

It has to be said that the sex scenes are explicit (though some are shot in elegant silhouettes), but their explicit nature hardly accounts for their power. Thanks to the great acting of the entire cast, as well as the editing by Jean-Christophe Hym and cinematography by Claire Mathon, Guiraudie makes you feel the desire that drives Franck to the edge of self-destruction; Michel is just too damn yummy for him to resist. At the same time, "Stranger by the Lake" is an indictment of mainstream gay culture and its fixation on perfect, chiseled bodies (the community immediately marginalizes anyone not stereotypically attractive). At times, the film almost becomes a medieval fable about the danger of encountering carnal perfection that's borderline inhuman.

Guiraudie's directorial assurance is stunning: the entire movie is a master class in audiovisual storytelling, as well as an exemplary case of immersing the viewer in an environment. From the choice of the titular lake (pretty but not gorgeous), to the beautiful details of the changing sunlight, play of shadows on naked skin, and the near-enchanted quality of the surrounding forest, Guiraudie creates a coherent world we immediately feel like we inhabit. The recurring shots of a parking lot serve both as punctuation and a narrative device (the day after the body is found there's hardly a car in sight), and the production design makes it purposefully unclear what era are we exactly in (mid-1990s is most likely: there's already AIDS awareness instead of AIDS panic, but no one owns a cell phone).

If there's some austerity to the film (and to character of Franck), it's softened not only by Henri's affable grumpiness, but also by the recurring appearances of Eric (Mathieu Vervisch): a puppy-like peeping tom, always eager to watch other guys have sex as he pleasures himself in bliss. Shots of Eric materializing out of nowhere are the great running joke of the film, but the character is never mocked or judged. Some guys, like the high-strung lover we first see Franck have sex with, are harsh with him, but Guiraudie is not. He shows Eric's total infatuation with Franck in a gentle, sympathetic manner, so that when Eric finally makes his big move and shares a beach towel with the object his desire, the moment is irresistible—not least to Franck.

Guiraudie, who first drew my attention in 2009 with the supreme "King of Escape" (a comedy of a gay man discovering he's madly in love with a woman), is definitely flirting with Hitchcock in "Stranger of the Lake", and some of the cutting is instantly recognizable as an homage. However, the complete lack of musical score (replaced by chirping birds, water lapping against the shore, and lovers panting in ecstasy), makes the film something more than a thriller—at its very best, it's a meditation on the nature od friendship and desire, as well as the maddening incongruity of the two.

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The-QuietOnes

RottenTomatoes

Movie Info

From the producer who brought you The Woman In Black and Let Me In comes the unnerving tale of The Quiet Ones. Tucked away in an estate outside of London, Professor Coupland along with a team of university students conduct an "experiment" on Jane Harper, a young girl who harbors unspeakable secrets. What dark forces they uncover are more terrifying than any of them expected. Inspired by true events, the film stars Jared Harris (Mad Men and Sherlock Homes: A Game of Shadows), Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire), Olivia Cooke (Bates Motel), and is directed by John Pogue from a screenplay by Craig Rosenberg and Oren Moverman and John Pogue, and based on a screenplay by Tom de Ville. (c) Lionsgate

RogerEbert

This site’s founder, the great Roger Ebert, had a pretty good rule concerning screen comedy, to the effect that, if you laugh, the movie is doing its job. You’ve got to show a little humility in the face of that. Hence, I can’t front too hard over "Home Alone," a movie that I have no admiration for in a lot of respects, because the first time I saw it, I laughed like a caffeinated hyena.

I guess the same thing ought to apply to horror movies. A new one, "The Quiet Ones," a PG-13 offering from the revived banner of Hammer, the classic low-budget genre house of the U.K. in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, is not inordinately innovative: its themes of supernatural possession and the challenges of documenting otherworldly phenomena have been done to death, so to speak. The opening "This Movie Is Based On Actual Events" is as old as the hills, too. But I gotta tell ya: I had my fingers in front of my eyes about a half dozen times during this movie. Granted, I was at a late-night screening in a theater with maybe a dozen other people, some of whom could have conceivably been up to no good, so maybe the atmosphere helped. But if you look at a horror movie’s prime directive to be to scare the viewer, there’s no denying that, at times, "The Quiet Ones" got me.

I also admit that I was rather taken with its period trappings. The move begins at Oxford University in the early ‘70s, and stays there. An abnormal psych expert played by Jared Harrishas been “studying” a young woman whose psychoses could be demonic possession, or could be a scientifically explainable telekinetic disturbance that can be ejected from the woman and trapped in another vessel. “Cure one and you cure the world,” the utopian prof promises. When the college suspends his funding, he takes his true believers—a couple of attractive, game students, and a less refined young A/V hunk who’s recording the treatment sessions on 16mm—to a deserted manor, the better to isolate the characters as doors open and shut themselves and the power goes out and so on.

The movie’s script, by director John Pogue, Oren Moverman ("Rampart," "The Messenger") and Craig Rosenberg (adapting an earlier work by Tom DeVille) is a little more conspicuously intelligent than most, threading an intriguing sexual jealousy theme into the movie’s narrative mix. That theme doesn’t amount to much as the picture oozes to a mayhem-merry climax, but it ratchets up the tension nicely. The obligatory explanation for all the nastiness mixes "The Exorcist" with "Peeping Tom" in a way that the filmmakers don’t satisfactorily exploit. And "The Quiet Ones"' fetishizing of vintage audio, film, and medical equipment recalls another recent British horror picture, "Berberian Sound Studio." As I fetishize such stuff myself, perhaps that aspect of the movie skewed my sympathies as well. Bottom line, though: I squinted, I looked away, I sank in my seat, I shuddered. For this movie, that means "Mission Accomplished."

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ABDUCTED

BobaFett
Great, that's the second cheap "Taken" knockoff that I have seen, within the same week! 

It's funny but the movie "Taken" basically was a basically knockoff and throwback itself to the revenge flicks of the '80's, yet it spawned a whole lot knockoffs of its own as well, none of which were as good or fresh as the movie "Taken" itself of course. 

And oh yes, this movie definitely is a knockoff! It even exactly copies some of the scenes from the movie, so it leaves no question about it. That in itself isn't enough to call this movie a bad one of course but the fact that it's a bad and cheap copy is. 

I actually start to notice how British movies are often far more brutal and straightforward than Hollywood movies when it comes down to graphic violence, yet they are never quite as hard-hitting and effective as well with it. It all comes down to quality. You can have as much violence in your movie as you want but when it isn't looking good and realistic enough, it's not going to work out. And that's the case with this movie as well. It's not a terrible looking or made movie but it's still a cheap looking one and instead of that helping to turn this movie into a raw and gritty one, it makes the movie a fake and silly looking one at parts. 

It's also trying a bit too hard to be as violent and graphic as possible. It really feels too forced and therefor also doesn't work out as anything effective. It makes the story and movie as a whole a not so very realistic one, which is actually something that really hurts this movie, seeing how it's trying to be more like a more realistic and 'subtle' type of action flick, in terms of its tone and atmosphere.

Also wasn't too fond to the casting of the movie. Mark Harris (who also wrote and directed the movie) looks in no way like a man who is capable of doing the rough and heartless things that his character has to do throughout this movie. He just looks like an average guy, who could be your neighbor, who in his spare time mows the lawn, takes his kids to soccer practice and in the weekends goes shopping with his wife. At the same time, that's sort of the point of the movie of course; to feature a normal everyday man, who gets pushed to the edge and is forced to take justice into his own hands but it still has to work out as something convincing in order to also work out as something effective and convincing, which just isn't really the case for this movie though. It just isn't very convincing when he goes on a violent spree and acts all tough and confident and scares off some tough and hardened criminals, who all look like they can have him for breakfast. 

There is also never a really good flow to things and the movie is really lacking a good build up at times. This especially becomes apparent during the movie its more dramatic and personal moments, which are cringe-worthy. All the more reasons why the movie just doesn't ever work out as the world's most engaging or convincing one. 

At the same time, the movie still isn't as terrible as some people make it out to be. Or perhaps I just simply only say that because I have seen some far worse genre examples throughout my life. In any case, the movie at least doesn't bore and it's not a completely unwatchable one but that's about as positive as I can get about it. 

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IMDb

• In an attempt to rebuild his marriage after the death of his son, Matt Hollis decides to take his wife and six year old daughter Lara on a trip of a lifetime to LA, to escape the constant reminders of their loss. Shortly after their arrival Matt's world is turned upside down when his wife is attacked in their holiday home, leaving her in a coma and their daughter LARA kidnapped by a child trafficking ring. Hunted by the police who mistakenly believe Matt has absconded with his daughter, he must evade capture and pursue the criminals responsible for Lara's abduction. Realizing he only has a 72-hour window of opportunity if he ever wants to see his daughter alive again, he enlists the help of Syan an old forces buddy, Matt tears a path of bloody vengeance through the streets of LA on a collision course with Lara's captors.
  - Written by Anonymous

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