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The situation [Evelyn] finds herself in seems huge, but it boils down to a woman who can't decide whether to take her husband off life support. The brain lives on, but what's the quality of life? Transcendence isn't about nanotechnology or robots or what horrors the future has in store for us. It's about the next day, the next hour, the next five minutes... I've seen better fiction films this year, but nothing as unexpectedly heartbreaking as the best moments in Transcendence.

The film looks surprisingly un-pretty for a film by a notable cinematographer. I presume it's intentional, but the visuals are blotchy verging on muddy and skin tones seem several degrees too hot (then again we also get the play of raindrops on glass, and dew falling from a flower in extreme slow-motion).

For most viewers, the problem with Transcendence will begin and end with Pfister's unschooled approach to dramaturgy, here savagely limited by the lifeless spectacle of people looking at and talking to computer screens, spouting bogus dialogue in explanation of cascading data we have no chance of gathering.

Kudos to Pfister for choosing to expand on some interestingly wild speculations, even if they seldom ring true. The core notion — that digital empowerment is a shortcut to megalomania — makes for a fascinating discussion flashpoint, it's just a shame that Pfister is too quick to let us know how he feels about the matter.

This expensive sci-fi feature marks the directorial debut of Christopher Nolan's longtime cinematographer Wally Pfister; like Nolan's Inception, it's conceptually rich and impressive on a technical level, but also heavy-handed as drama and surprisingly rudimentary in its sense of character... There are some wonderful ideas here, but Pfister lacks the storytelling chops to make them come alive onscreen.

Transcendence" is a moronic stew of competing impulses — bad science meets bad sociology meets bad theology — in which it's hard to say who looks worse: The naïve techno-boosters like Depp's Dr. Will Caster... wearing round spectacles and spouting clichés about the coming man-machine "singularity" apparently mined from Wired magazine in 1999, or the small-minded Luddite reactionaries of the so-called underground resistance...

Transcendence wants to raise real questions about scientific hubris, about the notion that science is always trying to perfect the world... But everything with Will's new cyberidentity goes so wrong so quickly, and in such a far-fetched manner, that the film's more philosophical aims come off as contrived; it doesn't earn its dystopia.

Transcendence, about a dying computer genius (Johnny Depp) who uploads himself in computerized form and achieves a problematic digital afterlife, is real science fiction. It explores its ideas with sincerity, curiosity and terrifying beauty... This makes its failures all the more depressing. A bad film is just a bad film. A well-intentioned film that reaches for greatness and keeps falling on its face is some kind of minor tragedy.

There's something very turn-of-the-millennium about its dread. Fear of artificial intelligence, interconnectivity, and the vast accumulation of data hasn't exactly died down, but Transcendence approaches those anxieties with the stop-the-presses urgency of a Y2K alarmist. The film rages, dully and impotently, against a future that has more or less already arrived.

Mr. Pfister has been the director of photography on most of Mr. Nolan's films, including the "Dark Knight" trilogy, and Mr. Nolan has given "Transcendence" his blessing by signing on as an executive producer. So it's no surprise that the depthless blacks and glowing whites in "Transcendence" and Mr. Pfister's use of negative space suggest Mr. Nolan's influence, notably in the high-tech complex where Evelyn and Will set up a compound.

All these questions and more were so hauntingly explored in Spike Jonze's magnificent Her, and in such effectively microcosmic form, that the detours and shortcuts that pile up as Transcendence lapses further into nü-tech sci-fi cliché seem all the more regressive in its wake. If you programmed an algorithm to figure out how The Lawnmower Man might be retold by Snake Plissken at the conclusion of Escape from L.A., you'd still wind up with a more recognizably human effort.

You won't be able to follow multiple subplots, nor will you care why Kate Mara is running around looking nervous. The blame must go to Wally Pfister, normally a gifted cameraman for Christopher Nolan but here, making his directorial debut, an uncertain helmer who tears too many pages out of his ex-boss's humorless playbook—while forgetting to make his visuals dazzle. Reboot.