How to make The Deepest Movie Ever: Four Steps (without pictures)
by Wally Pfister

1. This is the golden rule. No one should be able to make heads or tails of your movie. How can you call a movie deep if it’s easily and simply accessible? So there you go. Never clarify what you’re trying to say.

2. Mix neuroscience, mathematics, philosophy, religion, politics, sociology, computer science, logic, romance and zombie action with each other. It will make your movie incredibly deep.

3. Your actors should act as if they are drugged. Your lead male actor should say "Last night we made a breakthrough." every five minutes, your lead female actor should look confused all the time (and she should…

MOVIE RULE #34:

If your story is about the smartest scientists who've ever lived, don't have them act like the biggest fucking dummies on the planet.

This is what TRANSCENDENCE does. It is about the greatest technological minds of an era behaving like drooling morons. A dopey, lovesick scientist (Rebecca Hall, cursed with perhaps the single worst-written female character of 2014) realizes her husband, an even smarter technologist (Johnny Depp), is dying and makes the incredibly dumb decision to upload his consciousness into a "quantum" supercomputer. Within thirty seconds of coming online, the Depputer is like "I need to expand, and also get into the stock market, and y'know while I'm at it maybe get into some defense systems too."…

"Some scientists refer to this as the Singularity. I call it Transcendence."

For those of you who don't know, Jack Paglen's script Transcendence topped the Blacklist back in 2012 as one of most favored non-produced scripts released. Soon after, the script was swooped up by Christopher Nolan (who executive produced this with his wife, Emma Thomas) and his long-time cinematographer, Wally Pfister, who was set to direct. Eventually, Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman, and Rebecca Hall signed on and this looked like a guaranteed slam-dunk.

Well, unless you live under a rock, you will know that to most, that wasn't the case. Most have called the script "stupid" and called out the acting and lack of character development as well. With…

"We're not gonna fight them. We're gonna transcend them."

Transcendence is one of those rare films where you can't quite grasp what exactly it is that's missing, but somehow it fails to find a connection with most audiences. Wally Pfister seemed to have all the right ingredients for his directing debut. He had a terrific cast including Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, and Kate Mara, and a strong screenplay that Christopher Nolan even considered to use before going on to make Interstellar. We also know that Pfister can handle the visuals because he has been the cinematographer for Nolan in all his films since Memento. The film looks great and has a strong cast, but…

My wife has always been eager to change the world.
-Will Caster

Wally Pfister makes his directorial debut after 23 years as a cinematographer from newcomer Jack Paglen's first produced script. Two huge debuts here with a $100 million budget that could have benefited from either someone with more experience in the director's chair or on the written page.

Before Will Caster (Johnny Depp) passes away his brain or consciousness is "downloaded" into an Artificial Intelligence program. This brings up all sorts of questions from family and friends. Is this program really Will? Can human emotions exist in a program? If not, how does this change him? Is he actually just a dangerous copy of Will? This is the film's…

Based on the trailers, I was all set to go see this film at the cinema, but then I started reading reviews and comments from viewers and decided it might be a better idea to wait for the DVD to come out. In fact, I waited until it was being shown for free along with complimentary popcorn at the local community center ... and I am happy to report it was great! The popcorn, I mean.

Although the movie had an intriguing premise - a terrorist shoots a scientist, whose wife uploads his consciousness to a supercomputer in order to "save" him - it misses on more than a few cylinders. Most disappointing is Johnny Depp's wooden performance as the…

Here's a challenge for you: name the amount of successful directors who started out as celebrated cinematographers. Tricky one isn't it? The list is not a long one. Talent supporting the man or woman pulling the strings doesn't automatically translate as being *able* to pull those strings well, and it would be hard to find a more recent, more high profile example of this than Transcendence. From the pen of Jack Paglen & the lens of Wally Pfister, known as a major collaborator with Christopher Nolan on the Dark Knight trilogy amongst other films, his first foray into storytelling has been much hyped, much anticipated and much hoped to be on a par with Nolan - a high concept, neo-futuristic idea…

Wally Pfister's debut feature, "Transcendence," is a good looking science fiction film that brims with interesting ideas and important questions. Unfortunately, these ideas and questions, dealing with technology, humanity, and the blending of the two, do not have a story built to fully support them. Try as it might to be otherwise, the film feels underdone and disconnected. Still, "Transcendence" is a wholly watchable film that, at least, engages its audience for most of its duration.

Centering around the idea of sentient computers, "Transcendence" follows a husband and wife team who have pioneered a world-changing form of artificial intelligence. However, the pair has enemies, and an attack on them leads to their design becoming more than they could have imagined.…

This has a bit of Matrix and a bit of Person of Interest but it's not nearly as good as any of the two.
It has some very interesting ideas, the cast is great, but I'm not really sure what the moral of it all was supposed to be, that we should trust technologies more because in the end they are trying to make the world a better place? That being mentally controlled is not so bad as long as the planet is saved from pollution? No, thank you.
I'll be honest, I'd rather see the world die than being controlled by an AI to the point where I can't even notice I'm being controlled and I'm ready to do…