"TRANSCENDENCE" Gritty-Reboots "THE LAWNMOWER MAN."

This feels like the fastest we've gone from a teaser to a full trailer - literally a matter of days. I wonder if that has anything to do with the teaser essentially being a slow-reveal of Johnny Depp's face, and "Oh, it's Johnny Depp!" having gone from a boxoffice-benefit to a punchline over the last couple of years...




Anyway, this looks pretty damn good. Depp is a TED-Talky computer whiz with a mad on for The Singularity who gets assassinated by some kind of anti-technology terrorist group (the guy has "UNPLUG" tattooed on his writst), leading his colleagues to preserve his work by uploading his brain patterns into digital space which - spoiler alert for people who've never seen or read ONE other brain-uploaded-to-technology story - leads to him manifesting as a vaugely malevolent cyber-god.

Should be interesting, though I'm getting the sense I'll have to just accept that this is one of those stories where the back-asswards luddite guys wind up having been right all along or at least "had a point." Just once, I want to see one of these "tampering in God's domain!" movies where the visionary dudes trying to drag the damn species across the next goal-line of evolution are the heroes. For cinephiles, the main attraction is likely finding out if cinematographer Wally Pfister - making his directorial debut - is going to be the real deal. He's talked a lot of shit, and "Cinematographer of Great Movies Becomes Director of Middling-to-Bad Movies" is VERY common career story in this industry.