Entertainment movies Peter Mountain 2013 Alcon Entertainment

Your late, loving husband Will Castor (Johnny Depp), now a disembodied computer brain, has wired himself into another mans body, taken over his mind and voice and reaches out, saying, I can touch you now. If youre his/its wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), you might be touched at least literally. Anyone else among the characters or the audience of Transcendence is likely to be pretty seriously creeped out.

A love story between a human and a computer: we got one for Christmas, and it was called Her. Joaquin Phoenix fell hard for the voice of Scarlett Johansson who wouldnt? But in Transcendence, the provocative but ponderous science-fiction thriller written by Jack Paglem and directed by Wally Pfister, the dating game is an endgame. Will, a leading light in the study of artificial intelligence, and Evelyn, his devoted research assistant, are bound in love and work. To keep her love alive, she will enable his existence as a sentient being whose implications she may not have quite thought through.

(READ: Corlisss review of Spike Jonzes Her)

Smart machines that may serve or dominate mankind are as old as Samuel Butlers 1872 novel Erewhon and Karel Capeks 1920 play R.U.R. and as recent as this weeks episode of The Simpsons, in which Dr. Frink revives the dead Homer as a chatty screen saver. Next year, Marvels Avengers will reunite to battle a brilliant computer (and Oedipal wreck) in Age of Ultron. AI parables usually assume a Doomsday tone, preaching fear of the devices that keep the modern world running including the computers whose magic makes todays action-movie effects so very effective. A movie like Transcendence may be pertinent in its political reverberations of all computer data held in a cloud and monitored by the NSA, but it also rails against the tools its makers so artfully employ. Just dont tell the techies who masterminded the cool CGI stuff.

In the not too distant future, the world is without the Internet. Streetlights dont work; a cell phone is discarded; a computer keyboard is used for a doorstop. Flash back to five years earlier, when Will and his friend and colleague Max Waters (Paul Bettany) speak at a Silicon Valley conference. Max hopes to cure cancer and Alzheimers, but Will wants to create an AI greater than the combined brainpower of all humans who have ever lived on Earth. He has devised a Physically Independent Neural Network (PINN) that could build on the work of another scientist, who has managed to upload the brain of a rhesus monkey. Will PINN be the next step in technological and possibly human evolution?

(SEE: Top 10 Japanese Robots)

That notion is toxic to blond Bree (Kate Mara) and her cohorts in a radical, back-to-basics group called RIFT (Revolutionary Independence From Technology). Theyre sort of the 21st century Amish, except that in a 9/11-ish neo-Luddite attack, they kill computer programmers with exploding slices of birthday cake. One of the RIFTers shoots Will with a bullet that gives him radiation poisoning. Weeks away from certain death, he determines to upload his intelligence, his very soul and essence, into a computer. When he dies, a half hour into the movie, Evelyn and Max unplug PINN and in a lovely little frisson the last thing we see among the tumult of digits on the computer screen is the blink of a message: ANYONE THERE?

With some misgivings but much love, Evelyn keeps the system functioning and growing. Under cyber-Wills instructions, she buys up a desolate, depressed town called Brightwood and builds an enormous facility, whose screens show Wills omniscient visage and whose machines can perform miracle surgery, like giving sight to a man blind from birth. Crystalline particles rise from the ground and catch the wind (as in the 1956 sci-fi essential Invasion of the Body Snatchers) to spread the new gospel across the earth. Is this a Good Word or a triumph of Will?

(FIND: Invasion of the Body Snatchers among TIMEs Top 10 Sci-Fi Movies of the 1950s)

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REVIEW: Transcendence Has Only Artificial Intelligence