'Transcendence': If It Only Had a Brain: Critic Review for Transcendence on Moviebuff.com

'Transcendence' aims high, but the story fails to fulfill the promise of the premise

Roth Cornet, IGN

The movie has clearly chickened out of grappling with any of its deeper issues and instead provides a cowardly quick fix

Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Jack Paglen's script casts artificial intelligence and its dangers as the central trouble for its ensemble cast, but Pfister chooses to explore it in essentially a two-hour 'getting ready' montage

Charlie Schmidlin, Indiewire

'Transcendence', as its actually called, another science fiction thriller about the inevitable collision between humanity and technology

Bill Wine, CBS Local

Sleepy-eyed Johnny Depp is an implausible genius in this unclever sci-fi movie about artificial intelligence

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

Johnny Depp is aloof and awkward in the worst big-budget sci-fi film in years

Tim Robey, The Telegraph

Transcendence does not feel ambiguous or complicated, merely muddled and wishy-washy

Matt Zoller Seitz, Roger Ebert

'Transcendence' is an engaging, handsome movie asking desperately deep and meaningful questions that take our mind off the ridiculous price of popcorn and parking

Mini Anthikad Chhibber, The Hindu

Transcendence is about humanity and technology and the complicated relationship between them, but is no better at understanding people than a giant computer would be

Angie Han, Slash Film

The film is essentially a far-fetched, sometimes muddled, cautionary tale about mankind being taken over by the machines that they themselves have created, albeit with the best of intentions

Reagan Gavin Rasquinha, The Times of India

'Transcendence' which happens to be Pfister’s directorial debut, fails to keep us interested in what it actually has to say about the subject

Hon Jing Yi, Today Online

A tragic love story, constructed on the foundation of, "heal the planet for a better future for all of us"

Santa Banta Source, Santa Banta

'Transcendence' is a kind of high-tech horror story

Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post

Transcendence is not very thrilling, contains very few sequences of actual action and since there never seems to be much tension or high stakes, what action we do get is not very satisfying or thrilling

Kofi Outlaw, Screen Rant

'Transcendence' promises much and delivers very little

Aubrey D'souza, BookMyShow

Transcendence wants to tackle ideas as grand as what it means to be human, the destructive and redemptive power of love and the ethical limits of technology

Rob Hunter, Film School Rejects

'Transcendence' is a darker version of those types of movies, one where super computers and artificial intelligence get a grip on humanity and nothing good can come from it

Brian Tucker, The Wilmington-area Arts & Entertainment

'Transcendence' image pops up on screen, like some holographic specter, a kind of rebirth that thrills Evelyn and freaks out most everyone else, including, naturally enough, the extremists

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

'Transcendence' - The film is clunky and lifeless

Rajeev Masand, CNN-IBN Live

'Transcendence', which seems at first meant as a promotion of the real possibilities of artificial intelligence, mind uploading and nanotechnology

Christopher Campbell, Film School Rejects

'Transcendence' feels less like a film title and more like a mission statement, with the filmmakers hoping the movie would transcend its faults and become a fully realized story with fleshed-out characters and intellectually stimulating conversations

David Blaustein, ABC News

This sci-fi story with Johnny Depp bytes off more than it can process

Joe Neumaier, Daily News America

Big ideas and a big budget work at cross-purposes sometimes

Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter

Johnny Depp spins that for millennials in Transcendence by Skpying in his performance

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

'Transcendence' is an ambitious and provocative film about the perils and pleasures of artificial intelligence that is intriguingly balanced between being a warning and a celebration

Kenneth Turan, NPR

The thought of an apocalypse brought about by the very technology that we depend on every day is a hot topic to explore in this day and age

Ben Silverio, ScienceFiction.com

'Transcendence' is almost worth seeing just to see how horribly awry it goes, but in the end it cannot even be recommended on a “so bad its good” level

Chris Bumbray, JoBlo.com

'Transcendence': If It Only Had a Brain

Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal

‘Transcendence’ is unqualified masterpiece from technical perspective

Michael Clark, Gwinnett Daily Post

Something weird has happened to Johnny Depp in Transcendence, a science fiction film about what happens when the Internet develops a mind of its own

Jenny McCartney, The Telegraph

'Transcendence', an ambitious and thought-provoking, but ultimately disappointing, techno-thriller

Tim Lammers, BringMeTheNews

'Transcendence', a film so monotonous and spiritless that even the actors are bored while playing dress-up

Jeremy Kirk, First Showing

'Transcendence' is intellectually half-baked and seems too simplistic at times

Paloma Sharma, Rediff

'Transcendence' a lot of credit for actually being interesting and thoughtful in its concepts, but there are un-ignorable flaws in the execution

Eric Eisenberg, Cinema Blend

'Transcendence' ultimately hinges on the relationship of Caster and Evelyn

Jake Coyle, NDTV

The story may be fascinated with Will’s mind, but when it comes to a compelling narrative and worthwhile relationships, Transcendence is as lifeless as his body

Matt Goldberg, Collider

The ponderous and clunky Transcendence, already a commercial and critical flop in the US, marks the lowest point yet in what has been a depressing career downslide for Depp

Emma Dibdin, Digital Spy

This is the most interesting aspect of the film which, within the limits of Hollywood consumer epics, tries to present both sides fairly

Giulio Prisco, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Depp fails to convey any real sense of the passion and curiosity that supposedly drive Will Caster to do what he does

Scott Foundas, Variety

Overall, “Transcendence” is a good science-fiction film

Stephen Spoth, The Buffalo News

The urgency and intelligence of 'Transcendence' is not artificial, It feels sincerely animated by the frightful questions it poses about computing power and interconnectedness

MTV Source, MTV

This is the sort of interesting idea-driven film studios dont make much of, and its likely that trend will continue after this movie, which does not seem to be generating a lot of hype

Damon Houx, ScreenCrave

Johnny Depp looks bored by the silly science-fiction ideas of 'Transcendence'

Drew McWeeny, Hit Fix

'Transcendence' just does not compute

Rick Bentley, The Fresno Bee

'Transcendence' is a kind of high-tech horror story.

Michael O'Sullivan, The Macomb Daily

'Transcendence' doesn't seem to take a firm position one way or the other; so whatever happens, it implies, will be cause to freak out

Scott Tobias, The Dissolve

Runs into problems narratively, but the idea behind it is endlessly fascinating

Brad Brevet, Rope of Silicon

Critic Reviews for Transcendence