Review of Transcendence (2014) by Wietse — 01 Aug 2014

The movie managed to give form and shape to the concept of the singularity and highlight the greatest flaw in this scenario.

Us.

Story wise it's quite straightforward and worryingly understandable.

A handful of people decide that their opinion towards technology should be shoved down the entire world's throat and kills nearly all scientists and lab-employee within geographic range.

I think this about sums up the start and the cause of the entire story.

Grasping at her options, she sees her husband actually managed to upload the mind of a monkey.

Just like anyone with a lethal disease reading about the latest breakthrough, she wants it used on her dying husband.

Despite resignations her hubby's colleague agrees to help.

Freaked out that it worked, he bails.

Hubby digitized and shortly after uploaded to the internet hubby soon finds out who killed him.

He helps the government find his killers and leads them straight for them.

And of course the government doesn't arrests them but instead ask them to help them kill the digitized version of the man they already assassinated wait WHAT?

Yeah, they get the blessing of another colleague who by just asking one question knows the digi-husband isn't real. (mental note: do not pretend to be the AI as a jest when digitized).

The wife is given the stupid ball in the movie, unable to actually tell her computerized husband if he makes any mistakes. Even when asking her she keeps quiet about what she thinks is wrong.

So a regular marriage, and like in any marriage, her unwillingness to open up causes her to leave her husband.

Except her husband is a supercomputer powered AI running her husband's mind, and hunted by the government trying to blow it up because nobody elected the AI to run things.

So where in normal circumstances the wife would just screw around with another guy, she agrees with the military to have them stick a computer virus in her and then run back to digi-husband and give him a case of raging planetary cyber-std as soon as he tries to upload her.

Meanwhile our monitor-bound cyberhubbie built himself a brand new body.

Wife comes back, sees her hubby as a self-made man and she waivers...

But not very long, no matter how real he makes himself, she made up her mind to screw him over and nothing he can do will change her mind.

The explosion propelled shrapnel solidifies her choice as she loses consciousness through blood-loss.

His previous doubt about his wife's reasons to come back are put aside when he sees her hurt (so much for Joseph Tagger's assumtion he is just a machine who doesn't love. He is clearly letting in a dangerous element.

A conclusion that is confirmed when he tells his backstabbing colleague Max Waters who CLEARLY suffers from Stockholm syndrome that he KNOWS there is a virus and that he either can fight the virus or heal his wife.

He heals his wife, wife sees all the **** good he is doing to the planet and realizes he's been actively realizing HER plans with AI tech. Solve all the problems, heal the planet ans all that **** we really like to fix but don't because there is no money to be earned by doing it ourselves.

The virus takes hold, every villager he had fixed suddenly are sick again and surprisingly alive (soldiers surprised his 'upgrade' hadn't killed them). So his giant plan to fix the whole planet and humanity stops there and then.

In the end paradise is murdered for the low low price of the entire internet.

A cost we probably were willing to pay even though nobody asked the world.

So in the end it seems that a small part of this paradise exists for just 5 sunflowers and a small puddle of nano-infected water in which we might believe just 2 humans reside inside.

We're stuck with a world without electronics.

Hurray we won.

Great movie.

Horrible message.

Beware science, we will kill you if you try to fix things too fast.

PS: I would pay for a part 2 where we actually manage to make paradise work this time.