MAN’S unhealthy relationship with technology takes a sinister turn in Wally Pfister’s ham-fisted sci-fi thriller, which imagines the consequences of an artificial intelligence running amok in the digital realm.

The high-brow concept of Jack Paglen’s undernourished script is at odds with the whiz-bang pyrotechnics that director Pfister is asked to deliver in the muddled second act, ultimately starving the film of jeopardy.

Transcendence opens in California in the aftermath of a global blackout.

“The internet was meant to make the world a smaller place but it actually feels smaller without it,” muses Dr Max Waters (Paul Bettany).

We rewind to five years earlier, where Dr Waters’s good friend Dr Will Caster (Johnny Depp), a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, lives with his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall).

They are at the forefront of a scientific vanguard, which hopes to create a machine with sentience but extremists shoot Will with a poloniumtainted bullet.

With a month to live, Will uploads his mind to a supercomputer and then makes the leap into the digital abyss and every hard drive on the planet.

As Will’s thirst for knowledge intensifies, Dr Waters joins forces with fellow academic Joseph Tagger (Morgan Freeman), FBI agent Donald Buchanan (Cillian Murphy) and military man Colonel Stevens (Cole Hauser) to create a virus that will corrupt Will and protect mankind from his insidious influence. Transcendence begins promisingly, but screenwriter Paglen struggles to sustain dramatic momentum and the final hour unfolds at a pedestrian pace that makes the running time seem closer to three hours than two.

Damon Smith