Update: Barely a day after that pair of narrated teasers, a full trailer for Wally Pfister's Transcendence has arrived. Johnny Depp's voiceover is now revealed to be a TED talk, and we're given some much more detailed glimpses of what's in store on April 25. Fans of William Gibson's Neuromancer will be familiar with the character of Dixie the Flatline, whose consciousness lived on in Cyberspace when his body checked out. Johnny Depp's related experience looks to have resulted in something rather less benign. Stay tuned for some more detailed analysis, but in the meantime...
Wally Pfister’s old mucker Christopher Nolan released a teaser for his new sci-fi Interstellar last week and now it’s the turn of the protégé to step up to the mic. The DP-turned-director is taking a similarly elliptical route in promoting his movie debut, Transcendence, taking a leaf out his Nolan’s book to show a little ankle but not much else. From these two new trailers, though, you should get a flavour of what to expect: something cerebral, sweeping and just a little sinister. The first is narrated by Morgan Freeman – yes, Professor Voiceover himself – and the second by its protagonist Johnny Depp.
Depp stars as Will, a computer scientist deep into researching the singularity – the point at which artificial intelligence overtakes human and the two begin to merge. From the sounds of the film, that last part is taken literally here, as an incident forces Depp to upload his personality into the mainframe after anti-technology activists attack him.
So it appears that Will becomes a sort of Maria/TRON figure and that those around him, including Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy and Rebecca Hall must interact with a virtual Depp. “It’s a very timely subject as we find we have to update the software on our cell phones before we can even make a call,” Pfister told EW. We'll all be achieving **Transcendence **from April 25.