HAL, An Apocalypse And the Popcorn Accident

The bad news about “Transcendence” is I managed to drip popcorn butter all over the front of my pants. The good news is they were fishing pants anyway. Yes, dear reader, in selfless pursuit of timely film reviewing, I cut short a promising afternoon on a trout stream to see Johnny Depp in Wally Pfister’s film about a super-duper computer genius, Will Caster (Depp), who uploads himself into the super-duper computer network of everything, with mixed results. On the one hand, the uploaded Will can heal the blind, cure the sick, and send super-duper cyber spores out to heal the planet. On the other hand, the people Will heals also get a direct link installed at no extra charge. So whenever it suits Will to have Cletus the Yokel start talking in his voice, it happens. And this is disconcerting. See, Will is married to Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), who is just about as brainy and also looks good in capri pants. Along with the inevitable third wheel, Max (Paul Bettany), they go to speak about artificial intelligence at one of those annoying super-duper technology talks, and some guy in the crowd asks Will if he’s planning to build God, or what? Then the guy (or maybe a confederate, it happened kind of fast and I was dealing with the butter problem) shoots Will outside the auditorium. Will survives the shooting, but the cunning members of the anti-technology underground group dunked the bullet in a super-duper radioactive poison first. So Max and Evelyn upload Will before he dies. And by golly, after a couple of false starts, there he is, popping up out of iPads and issuing gnomic utterances. Meanwhile Max gets kidnapped by the terrorists, although as the show goes on they seem less and less crazy. And go on the show certainly does. Memo to moviemakers: the average human gets fidgety after the 90-minute mark. These days, thanks to the wonders of technology, the average person can’t even sit still for a 45-second video of someone’s cat allegedly singing the first verse of “I Get a Kick Out of You.” And my own personal rear end falls asleep after an hour and a half. So while there are explosions, and nifty computer thingies, and robot arms that repair eyes, grow ferns and could probably get a cat to sing Cole Porter songs, there are also a lot of closeups of falling water and flowers — complete with swelling music that indicates this is significant! We’re talking HAL from “2001” on steroids, if anything involving the slender Mr. Depp can be said to be on steroids. We’re talking a good-looking girl who, alas, does nothing so crass and ordinary as get nekkid. And we’re talking a good apocalypse angle, if your idea of the end of the world is your iPhone not working. At all. Anywhere. It’s not a bad flick, even if it is about 30 minutes too long. It’s a provocative topic — how much technology is too much? Other critics have roasted “Transcendence.” I suggest they try it again — this time with a leaky bag of popcorn in their laps. Not laptops.Rated PG-13 for action, violence, language and sensuality; Playing widely.