10 Years Ago, Wally Pfister Made ‘Transcendence’ and Was Never Heard From Again [Retrospective]

In 2012, Wally Pfister was on top of the world. The cinematographer had a long career during the 90s shooting cheap, tawdry erotic thrillers like In the Heat of Passion and Animal Instincts, before becoming director Christopher Nolan’s longtime partner, working with the director on every one of his films since 2000’s Memento. Just the year before, he had just won his first Academy Award for his work on 2010’s mind-bending dreams-within-dreams blockbuster Inception. However, in the year of our lord 2024, Pfister’s most recent IMDb credit is as cinematographer for a specialized Taco Bell ad called Web of Fries II – Franchise Wars (starring Josh Duhamel), and his other high-profile directing jobs include projects like that unintentionally funny Matt Damon crypto ad that played in perpetuity during the preroll block at my local Regal cinema a couple of years ago. 

But in 2012, Pfister had nowhere to go but up. That year, he was brought on board to helm the reins on Transcendence, a sci-fi script that his agent had passed his way that led to Pfister feeling it was a natural fit for his directorial debut. Given its heady, cerebral story about a genius AI scientist whose dying consciousness is uploaded into a computer system which starts him on a path for an insatiable need for omnipresent power, it felt like something of a Nolan-light feature on paper, afforded further credibility by the director and his producing partner/wife Emma Thomas signing on as executive producers. This was on top of its $100 million budget and its stacked cast including Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, and Nolan film luminaries Cillian Murphy and Morgan Freeman. The film was shaping up to be an ambitious venture for Pfister, and he knew a lot was riding on the film’s reception and performance. 

Anyone who was around in 2014 already knows how this story ends: Transcendence was a huge, high-profile commercial and critical bomb, only earning $23 million domestically against its $100 million budget (and just barely eking out a total of $103 million worldwide grosses, though with advertising costs the film assuredly still failed to break even). The then-52-year-old Academy Award-winning filmmaker was hastily shut out of any future directing jobs, stuck into that nebulous space commonly known as Director’s Jail. 

I’d love to come to you with an unexpected defense of Transcendence; a passionate appeal for movie fans to pay this film a second look and realize it was misjudged upon release, and that audiences simply weren’t prepared for the vision of Pfister’s film. Alas, this is no reclamation. The truth is less romantic: Transcendence still sucks 10 years later, though it has less to do with Pfister specifically than the material he had committed himself to. Written by Jack Paglen, whose only other writing work appears to consist of a co-writing credit on the underrated Alien: Covenant, the film plays as the pseudo-highbrow and faux-intellectual version of 90s techno cautionary tale prattle like The Lawnmower Man. 

Only, watching The Lawnmower Man today actually reveals it to be surprisingly introspective and piercing with regards to its story about mania and power heightened by delusions of grandeur and progress through tech, accentuated by its dated and crude visual effects which are now so provocatively freakish they read as an unnerving, vulgar expression of the things we fetishize. Transcendence wishes it was half as interesting as The Lawnmower Man. It trades in exactly the same themes, yet relegates them to a ceaselessly dull, bland thriller about Johnny Depp’s consciousness, and therefore his uncanny visage, being uploaded into a supercomputer AI program and trying to take over the world. It’s not so much that this plot can’t be a good movie in theory, it’s more that the proceedings are treated with a grave sense of portent and earnestness. A movie that is impossible to take seriously in drenched with self-seriousness. 

Even its subject matter having a timely resurgence in relevance can’t do this film any retroactive favors. Depp and Hall are husband and wife AI scientists, both entrenched in the work of developing “transcendence,” a model of AI capable of full self-consciousness. In a world where the progress of AI is now a cultural flashpoint, the catalyst for months-long Hollywood strikes, and prompting articles from the FTC highlighting the tech’s dangers, you would think Transcendence would have newfound insights within its tech anxieties. That’s not really the case with a film that voices its concerns as broadly as this one, and which culls its thought-provoking thematics down into a black-and-white thriller about the government and a group of violent anti-AI radicals teaming up to take down the evil Johnny Depp computer, fabricating drama through hilariously staggering gaps in character logic. This is the type of movie that doesn’t sound all that bad on paper, but sit down to watch it and you’ll find how much of a simultaneous bore and accidental farce that it is. 

If Transcendence has any redeeming qualities it’s in its visuals—not that watching a bored Rebecca Hall talk to a bored Johnny Depp on a computer screen inspires much in the way of exciting imagery. But Pfister did have the good sense to follow in the resolute footsteps of his mentor to insist that the movie be shot on 35mm film stock, giving it a bit of a leg up in its general visual sense due to that reliable texture and authenticity that comes with shooting on film. It’s to that end I would argue Transcendence is not some irredeemably terrible film that would deem Pfister as unwarranted in spearheading future projects as a director. It’s decidedly miscalculated and laughable in its navel-gazing, but at a passing glance, it has a reasonable sense of filmmaking craft holding it up. 

The ultimate point is that the entire idea of Director’s Jail, to bar a filmmaker from helming future projects because of a single failure, is completely antithetical to the act of filmmaking itself. To be fair, there isn’t much reporting on any films that Pfister attempted to direct following Transcendence, but a look at his Letterboxd profile is striking: his final job as DP was on The Dark Knight Rises in 2012 (Nolan has teamed up with Hotye van Hoytema for each of his releases since). It paints an image of two scenarios: a man who abandoned Hollywood or a man who was abandoned by Hollywood. 

For certain, it should have been easy enough for Pfister to go back to doing more DP work given his resume and accolades, yet his lack of high-profile projects in a decade implies a man burnt out by the Hollywood machine. Perhaps he never felt compelled to return to cinematography after winning his Oscar, as he once said, “I was looking for a change in my life; I had been working as a cinematographer and more specifically with Christopher Nolan for 15 years. And I just wanted to try different things.” Aside from his previously mentioned post-Transcendence work, his slender filmography also consists of directing episodes of television shows like The Tick and Flaked, jobs that feel like they’re taken up to pay the bills.

Regardless, a director being made an example of within the industry after producing a bomb has been a standard practice for a long time, one that it would be hard to imagine Pfister wouldn’t be subject to. This is true even for established directors: Damien Chazelle, an Oscar-winning Best Screenplay and Best Director winner, was seemingly the most recent casualty as he openly expressed doubt about getting his next film made and lamented the fact that no matter what he does next he won’t be getting the same type of carte blanche he got for Babylon—though it was recently announced that his new project is officially set at Paramount. Tom Hooper, the Oscar-winning director of Best Picture winner The King’s Speech, hasn’t been heard from since 2019’s viral disaster Cats. Hollywood is a business, and they’re ruthless if you squander their money.

The basis of art in general is the ability to try new things, see what connects, and then pick up and try again. But that conflicts with the business side of the film industry, and the realities of capitalism and producers that want a return on their investment—meaning, inevitably, directors lose their opportunity to realign and audiences lose the opportunity to see whatever a locked-up filmmaker’s next venture would look like. Not that I’m ever sure I’ll enjoy a Tom Hooper movie, but it’s about the principle of the creation of art and what it means to be doing it at a high level where it’s defined by spreadsheets and critical and audience reactions. I believe there’s no greater example of someone we were robbed of a future movie from than Pfister, a director who had one bad crack at it and never got the chance to go back up to bat. This is not a plea to reassess Transcendence—once again, the movie is bad—but for filmmakers such as Pfister to have more of an opportunity to fail. 

Transcendence was released by Warner Bros on April 18, 2014. It is available to rent on Prime Video.