For a variety of reasons, I had low expectations for this Sci-Fi movie starring Johnny Depp, Morgan Freeman, Rebecca Hall and Paul Bettany. As it turns out, the film was worse than I expected. Much much worse. Last month I saw “Divergent”. I thought the problem with that film was that it lost most of my interest before the story got interesting. In “Transcendence”, it never got interesting. What it did was steal from other movies. The basic concept smells like “The Lawnmower Man”, the 1992 film starring Pierce Brosnan but that’s another story. Johnny Depp, who sleepwalks through the whole damn thing, plays Dr. Will Caster. Early on, we learn that he and his researcher wife, Evelyn (Hall), have devoted their life’s work to artificial-intelligence research. But when a group of anti-technology extremists shoot the poor bastard, his wife uploads his intelligence into a sophisticated computer system. From that moment on, “Transcendence” tries to take flight like one of Christopher Nolan’s movies, say “Inception”, but it lands with a resounding thud. How could Wally Pfister, Nolan’s beloved cinematographer and an Oscar winner, take so many missteps? The lousy script, credited to Jack Paglen, could serve as a model on how to botch suspense, character and intelligence. A microscope and a search party could not find any trace of originality in his atrocious script. Not to mention the alleged “shocking” ending that has been predicted so far in advance even the actors look bored breathless having to act the damn thing out. At the end, “Transcendence” does reach its own kind of perfection — it fails on every conceivable level. It’s easily one of Depp’s worst movies and my number one contender for worst Science-Fiction movie of the year. It’s that awful.

Fiasco!