Like seasons, hairstyles and fashion, genre popularity in Hollywood runs in cycles. Historical epics have faded in and out of favor since the 1930s, for example, and appear to be on the rise again, with Ridley Scott’s Exodus, Darren Aronofsky’s Noah and two movies based on the Hercules legend all on the horizon. It’s not just historical epics making a comeback, either. With Wally Pfister’s directorial debut Transcendence, we could be in for a mini revival of the cyber thrillers of the 1990s.

If you don’t know anything about Transcendence yet, you can catch up with the first trailer here. Briefly, it’s about a scientist (Johnny Depp) who’s killed by terrorists shortly after completing some groundbreaking research into machine intelligence. Grief stricken, his partner (played by Rebecca Hall) has the scientist’s consciousness uploaded into cyberspace, where his sudden expansion of knowledge and power grow to a worrying extent.

Wally Pfister has built up a formidable reputation as Christopher Nolan’s cinematographer, so it’s little surprise that this, his debut as a director, is beautifully shot and lit. It boasts a sterling cast, too, with Morgan Freeman, Paul Bettany and Cillian Murphy all in supporting roles. Yet behind all that, the plot shares certain elements in common with The Lawnmower Man, a mid-budget sci-fi movie from 1992.

Loosely based on the Stephen King story of the same name (so loosely that King sued to have his name removed from the credits), The Lawnmower Man saw scientist Dr Lawrence Angelo (a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan) conduct research into the brave new frontier of virtual reality. Angelo uses a mentally disabled gardener named Jobe (Jeff Fahey) as his guinea pig, and inadvertently turns him into a hyper-intelligent being who threatens become a non-corporeal life form and control the planet via its computer systems.