For those who follow my site, you may have noticed one crucial film from last year wasn’t reviewed. That film was what critics named the third best of last year, Spike Jonze’s Her. I didn’t skip a review because I didn’t see it— I did —but because I found that its content was so dense, confounding, puzzling, enigmatic, but still altogether energetic and potent, that I didn’t know what to say. It was the only new film from 2013 that had that effect on me, and I knew to fairly judge the film, it had to sit with me. Multiple viewings became necessary, and my winter season was too busy for a second screening before it hits Blu. In Her, an AI named Samantha and a lonely and an isolated man fall in love. It’s a ridiculous premise, but one which posed every serious question we currently have about technology, and did so with a profound beating heart. We felt these concerns instead of just over-intellectualizing them, and, suddenly, “Can a computer feel?” “Where does human intelligence end and ‘artificial’ intelligence begin?” “Where are we going?” And, “Are we so different?” took on meanings both internalized and understood. Her dramatizes what futurists and science fiction writers have been confronting for decades, and does it with extraordinary depth, both scientific and human. I had Her on my mind a lot while I was watching Wally Pfister’s directorial debut, Transcendence. Their similarities run deeper than a premise in the same genre, but everywhere Her succeeds, Transcendence falters.

Transcendence is a thriller without thrills and science fiction without ideas. The title becomes an ironic tease of everything it should have been, but none of what it was. Johnny Depp plays acclaimed scientist Dr. Will Caster, a figure so loved in the scientific community that he gives talks in massive lecture halls and takes up entire covers of Wired Magazine. He’s made an extraordinary breakthrough towards developing a sentient intelligence and is eager to make the discovery that will unlock the ultimate AI, intelligence so powerful, he claims, that it will go beyond the collective minds of everyone in the history of the world. His partner (Rebecca Hall) and best friend (Paul Bettany) are researchers, and they help. An extremist group known as RIFT (led by Kate Mara), an anti-technology collective that believes technology to be the undoing of mankind, attacks him after a talk for corporate sponsorship. He’s impaired, and he and his colleagues realize the only way to save him is to upload his consciousness and become the first great AI. He becomes power hungry, and it’s unclear if he’s actually a well-intentioned solution to all of mankind’s problems or if RIFT’s concerns are valid. That’s the central mystery to Transcendence, and one that’s never completely solved.

The film’s problems are clear from the start. I’ve talked before about Gladiator’s masterful opening minutes, where I noted “over the film’s opening act (even first five or ten minutes) you understand his feelings, his desires, what he believes in, what he doesn’t, and ultimately what he fights for. You get a tangible sense of who he is as a person. It’s incredibly easy to go along with him on his journey because he’s such a well-established character.” Transcendence does the opposite. We hardly understand Dr. Will Caster. We’re told he doesn’t want to change the world. So why is he trying to build a machine that would inevitably redefine the future? In fact, why does he want to build the AI at all? We’re never told. He simply wants to. That’s as thick as characterizations get, and if you search for a reason to care about the characters, you will fail. This is a particularly bitter point in comparison to Her, which nails this aspect with sensitivity and bravado. Worse still, RIFT bears all the credibility of a local Marx impersonator handing out pamphlets on aliens at your local bus stop. It’s hard to imagine a group like this could ever exist, but when you notice they have “unplugged” tattoos and are apparently baristas at coffee shops, you wonder if they began as a counterculture movement in Portland, planning violent schemes as they sipped nonfat soy lattes.

The film has but one primary similarity to Inception, but instead of a special chemical to help people share dreams, you have Johnny Depp uniting the cast to sleepwalk through their roles. Bettany and Hall try and inject some humanity, and very occasionally levity, into the otherwise dour and self-serious film. It can be said of their work and the film as a whole that the ambition is admirable. They don’t sell their characters or the narrative as a whole, but they and the film try. Kate Mara is frozen by the stilted material, and she had no reason to take this part. The longer the film continues, the more it crumbles, and the shame is that it’s also so clear why. It’s almost a compliment to say a film doesn’t work but you’re not sure the cause, but in Transcendence it’s crystal. It’s as though the film remains in the outskirts of its own story, an extended montage of loosely related moments that never add up, making Transcendence an unwanted and frustrating enigma.