Not many first-time directors have the cinematic pedigree of Transcendence director Wally Pfister. A long-time cinematographer, Pfister has worked extensively with Christopher Nolan on films including The Dark Knight, Memento and Inception (which he won the Best Cinematography Oscar for). He has also worked on other hits, including Moneyball, Laurel Canyon and The Italian Job. It was only a matter of time before he crossed over to directing, and although he was a master of the craft of cinematography, the time finally came for him to sit in the director’s chair; thus came his directorial debut, Transcendence. NBN got a chance to talk to Pfister about the film, and lend a review before its April 18th release date.
“I always wanted to direct something myself,” Pfister said. “As I started to get more successful as a cinematographer, I started thinking about it more and more. You want to try different things in life. It’s been knocking on my door for years, and it was fun to try it out.”
The sci-fi thriller stars Johnny Depp as a brilliant artificial intelligence researcher who uploads his brain to the Internet after being mortally wounded. Soon, he becomes so powerful that he can regenerate bodies and objects at will, and his power grows to the point where nothing can stop him. His colleagues begin to question whether or not the advanced technology he created is beneficial, and some begin to fear the end of non-artificial life itself.
Like all of the films Pfister has worked on, Transcendence was shot on film instead of with digital cameras. It almost mirrors the anti-technology theme of the film, preferring the more primitive and authentic method. Ask Pfister though, and he would tell you that film technology is more sophisticated than digital, and not the other way around.
“I’m waiting for digital technology to catch up,” he said. “Film is much higher resolution, there’s better contrast, better color saturation. It may seem nitpicky to some, because digital cameras look pretty good on a big screen, but film looks better. A lot of the beauty of photography is in the subtleties and nuances.”
The film looks great, and Pfister is definitely a technical wizard. The visual effects are fantastic, and the film crew does a great job of capturing the elaborate sets and devices that make up the laboratories in the movie. Pfister toured several leading research universities before filming, including MIT, Stanford and Berkeley, to get an idea of what state-of-the-art projection and hologram devices looked like. He also had nanotechnology professors advising him and informing him on what the technology could be in the future, and nanotechnology was the basis of the regenerative processes in the film.
But what makes Transcendence intriguing is that it’s not a pure sci-fi adrenaline rush. A large part of the film is a romance between Depp’s character and his wife (Rebecca Hall of Vicky Cristina Barcelona), an equally brilliant scientist who activates Depp’s artificial brain as a means of coping with his physical death. She revives his mind, regains the ability to communicate with him and begins to fall back in love with a virtual version of her husband. Easy comparisons can be drawn to the Oscar-winning film Her, and to a point, Transcendence is a darker exploration of a romance between man and machine.
“When I saw Her, I had already completed our film, and while I was relieved that they were two very different films, I was a huge fan,” Pfister said. “What it said to me is that this is stuff we’re all thinking about right now. As we talk to Siri, listen to our GPS, communicate through social networks and get asked questions by machines – where do you go to school, who are your friends – we are communicating with artificial intelligence on a daily basis.”
Transcendence has the bones of a great film, maybe even of a sci-fi classic like The Matrix and The Terminator. But there are points where Pfister’s directoral debut stumbles. Whereas the script could have lightly touched on the theme of the dangers of technology, it instead beats viewers over the head with it to the point of near-paranoia. Pfister said that he wanted the characters to make statements instead of the filmmakers, but they make a few statements too many, and it takes away from the fun and imagination of the film’s premise. Pfister also stated that he wanted to make a film where there are “no good guys and no bad guys,” and ambitious as that may be, it’s taken to an extreme where you don’t know which characters to root for, and it’s hard to sympathize.
Other parts of the film are a mixed bag. There is a tremendous amount of talent in the cast, but the filmmakers don’t utilize all of it. Morgan Freeman is a brilliant actor, but doesn’t serve much of a purpose in the film besides to smile and nod. Hall has some excellent moments, but breaks out ridiculous facial expressions from time to time, and does a lot of storming around angrily like she’s emulating Elmer Fudd. Then some of the acting is downright awful – Kate Mara should really stick to TV. All that being said, you can certainly have fun with the film if you take it for what is – a piece of fiction. Messages and melodrama aside, Pfister emphasized that they were first and foremost creating something fun, and if you go into the film with that expectation, you may just come out thinking it was worth it.
“It’s important to remember the ‘fi” in ‘sci-fi,’” said Pfister. “Obviously you can’t upload the human brain to a computer with the current technology right now. This is designed as entertainment, so we pushed the limits.”