Brett Leonard
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
Forget that the basic plot, about a dying researcher whose consciousness is uploaded into a computer, bears a certain resemblance to the 1992 techno-thriller The Lawnmower Man .
The densely plotted screenplay by Jack Paglen — another first-timer — is built squarely on the bones of classic Technology Is Scary movies from “Soylent Green” on, with an unacknowledged debt, perhaps, to “The Lawnmower Man” (1992).
Didn’t “The Lawnmower Man” cover remarkably similar ground in 1992?
Playing like a somber, meditative update of that nutty 1992 virtual reality schlocker The Lawnmower Man, Transcendence introduces us to Will (Johnny Depp) and Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) Caster, who form a “brilliant” scientific duo working on a ground-breaking advancement in artificial intelligence.
The concepts of humans and technology becoming intertwined is interesting, and the hope is that this could not only entertain but make us think about our own future, like “The Terminator” films (the good ones, anyway) or even “The Lawnmower Man” (honestly haven’t seen it in 15 years but remember that movie??)…however the storytelling is dull and never really engages the viewer, and it’s forays into a horror/sci-fi feel late in the film seem preposterous instead of climactic.
The first feature by cinematographer Wally Pfister (“Inception,” “Moneyball,” “The Dark Knight Rises”) suffers from a script aiming for present-tense future shock that mashes up an unholy hybrid of movies past and clichés everlasting, notably “The Lawnmower Man” and “An Inconvenient Truth.”
As extracted from what must have been a very busy Stephen King short story (written, quite obviously, in the 10 or 15 minutes after King had watched Cliff Robertson's great "Charly" on his VCR) it follows as a research scientist uses some kind of virtual reality therapy to transform a retarded lawn-mowing man into a) a genius and b) a god.
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
influenced by Virtuosity (1995)
Characters
Just what The Entity is, we’ll all have to wait for “Part Deux,” but as best I can tell it’s something of a hybrid of a ChatGPT artificial intelligence nursing a bottle of Jim Beam and that pained virtual incarnation know as SID (sadistic, intelligent and dangerous) from the 1995 sci-fi whimper known as “Virtuosity,” a movie that people only went to see because it starred Denzel Washington and forgot about quickly because of McQuarrie’s “Usual Suspects.”
Anyone remember The Lawnmower Man (1992) or Videodrome (1983)?
He cherry-picks elements from “The Tree of Life” and “The Lawnmower Man” and mashes them into a macabre concoction that looks cool but isn’t meant to be digested.
Is that Jobe from The Lawnmower Man calling on all those phones at once?
…had about as much to do with King’s story as the Lawnmower Man movie did with the King tale of that name…
This is the first of a string of similar films (preceding The 13th Floor and eXistenZ, which was far better) dealing with virtual reality; is anyone really that nostalgic for The Lawnmower Man?
The first is full of films, both great and not so great – movies like The Shining, an unquestioned masterpiece, or something so far afield like The Lawnmower Man, which really only shares the title with a Stephen King short story.