I found this film to be consistently entertaining and it kept my attention throughout. It may not be quite as thought-provoking as the filmmakers had hoped, but it does have several interesting aspects to it. I think it deserves better than the generally negative reviews and middling box office it has gotten. The high concept premise and well known cast may have been part of the reason for this, raising expectations beyond what the film could meet.
The film's basic concept would have been even more fresh and surprising if a little less had been revealed in the trailers. The plot concerns an artificial intelligence researcher, played by Johnny Depp, who is assassinated by an extremist group. Before he dies, his consciousness is uploaded onto a computer, where he begins to gain more power and eventually becomes a potential threat to the current world order. I wish the trailers had limited themselves to only showing the first part of this story, but they went as far as showing scenes of the military attempting to shut him down, scenes that take place near the very end of the film. This gave away the direction the film would be taking, leaving little room for surprises along the way. The film is bookended by a pair of scenes set a few years in the future, where almost all technology and power has been lost. I thought including the prologue scene was effective, as it set a fatalistic tone for the film. It could have been even more effective if the trailer hadn't spoiled so much of the film's trajectory, as it would have further piqued the viewer's curiosity as to what events might happen to cause this future.
It is to the film's credit that, in spite of the trailer giving away too much, it still managed to slip in a few unexpected twists. Chief among them is the approach it took to its subject matter. The film was not entirely a warning about the risks that go hand in hand with technological advances. It takes a more nuanced view, exploring the good that Depp's character manages to do with the massive amounts of computational power he acquires. The easy way out would have been to make stopping Depp a necessary victory that was achieved at great cost. Instead the film asks, in the end, whether stopping Depp's character was really the right thing to do. Were the things he was doing really that bad?
While the film does not transcend the medium (sorry, I couldn't help it) and become something truly original, it does have its share of original moments that made it a fun, and more interesting film than I'd expected.
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