Transcendence Review: 10 Reasons It Sucks

8. It's Weirdly Sexist

If you've ever seen Parade's End, you'll know Rebecca Hall is a good actress. But off Transcendence's evidence, you wouldn't think so. This obviously isn't all her own fault €“ even the most talented actors stumble with a poor script, and Hall's script is poor indeed. She's given no motivation beyond loving her husband, and even then goes to utterly irrational extremes using the writer's shorthand for strange actions and motivations €“ love. If Hall's Evelyn Caster was a layman, you could possibly understand. However, she isn't €“ she's one of the finest minds of her generation, a supremely rational person regarded by her husband as smarter than Paul Bettany's similarly brilliant scientist. In the opening scenes, she's up on-stage presenting her own thesis, not just standing as a cheerleader for her husband's amazingly lofty ambitions, and carries this intellectual promise later into the film by downloading his brain onto a cannibalised, home-made AI. Such accomplishments are far beyond the cream of the intellectual crop, never mind laymen. But then the wheels start to fall off, and pretty spectacularly to boot. Clearly flabbergasted that she's managed to upload her husband's consciousness into a computer, she doesn't bat an eyelid at his instant demands to be uploaded into the internet to access Wall Street, because apparently this incredibly clever person can't seem to get beyond her feelings. Hell, it's only when he starts lobotomising people that she realises things might be wrong. This leads to a bafflingly flat scene when she gets upset because he's reading her hormones/feelings, and she once again flies off the handle. The implicit message seems to be that women's emotions spoil anything no matter how accomplished they are, and that's a really odd thing to take away. In hindsight, maybe Hall should've chosen a different role to showcase her talents, and not something that just required her to be hysterical and upset in equal measure.