Transcendence (Wally Pfister 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Transcendence (2014) is not the sub-Kubrickian but nonetheless quite fascinating commutative editing, which results in a film with only half a dozen scenes dispersed among its 105-minute stream of images replacing one another with no memory of what appeared before each of them and no necessary connection to what appears after each of them, nor is it the the moment when you begin to imagine an alternative version in which Rebecca Hall’s character was played by Miranda Hart, nor the moment when you begin to imagine Johnny Depp’s character was played by an actor and resembled a character, nor the bit when you start aching for the AI, having hooked itself up to the internets, to come across an online copy of Colossus: The Forbin Project and become depressed or The Lawnmower Man and become really depressed or Demon Seed and start building something really nasty in the basement, nor is it the end credit which says ‘A WALLY PFISTER FILM’ when even then surely they must have know it was really a case of ‘THE WALLY PFISTER FILM’, no, the very best thing about Transcendence is the bit right near the end when the soldier played by Cole Hauser exclaims ‘it didn’t kill anyone’, which was basically my complaint, too…