Transcendence
The perils of uploading Johnny Depp to a supercomputer.
Think of the sci-fi thriller Transcendence—the first feature film directed by Christopher Nolan’s longtime cinematographer, Wally Pfister—as a companion piece to Spike Jonze’s moody artificial-intelligence romance Her.
Both
films take place in not-too-distant futures—one apocalyptic, the other
deceptively rosy—in which the line between technology and human
consciousness has grown vanishingly thin. In both, a human protagonist
falls in love (or, in Transcendence’s case, remains in love)
with a digital entity whose ontological status is never quite clear: Is a
person without a living body, whose memories, thoughts and feelings are
encoded as data in a machine,
still a person? And in both movies, the
consequences of this attempt to love across the human-machine barrier
are unforeseeable, far-reaching, and potentially destructive to the
civilized world (or at least Joaquin Phoenix’s heart).
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