The focus on artificial intelligence in 'Transcendence' with Johnny Depp is brilliant because it lets the audience decide questions of good and evil.

Though its plot and premise are pure science fiction, "Transcendence" goes pleasingly against the genre grain.

A story of the possible perils and pleasures of artificial intelligence that stars Johnny Depp, "Transcendence's" ideas are at least as involving as its images, if not more so. And as written by Jack Paglen and directed by Wally Pfister, this film is intent on not limiting itself to simplistic questions of pure good and evil.

As "Transcendence's" narrative of the battle between pro and anti-technology forces unfolds, justice is done to the complicated factors at play here. Determining with certainty whom the heroes and villains of this narrative are is not so easily done.

Though Pfister is well-known as Christopher Nolan's longtime cinematographer (nominated for four Oscars, a winner for "Inception"), both he and screenwriter Paglen are first-timers in their respective chairs, and there are times when that shows. "Transcendence's" exposition is not always sharp, emotional connections (with the exception of Depp's outstanding costar, Rebecca Hall) are not its strength, and it does not make memorable use of its Imax format.

But because the underlying ideas are involving, those problems fade from view, leaving us with an ambitious and provocative piece of work that is intriguingly balanced between being a warning and a celebration.

Certainly the boon-or-bane question of artificial intelligence has been a movie staple at least since the days of HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick's "2001." (In fact, a purely negative example of some of this film's ideas appears in the current "Captain America: Winter Soldier.")

"Transcendence" begins in the near future, maybe as close as tomorrow. Narrator Max Waters (an excellent Paul Bettany) walks through the streets of a Berkeley patrolled by armed soldiers. The city —- and every other city, we soon learn — is in the grip of some kind of worldwide power blackout.

Max walks to a classic wood shingle Berkeley house, now in ruins but once the home of Dr. Will Caster (Depp) and his wife, Evelyn (Hall). Max knew them better than anyone, he says, and he is prepared to vouch for the fact that they wanted nothing but the best for humanity.

Back we go five years, to the bulk of "Transcendence's" story. Depp's Will is a brilliant scientist, distracted in a Disney Gyro Gearloose kind of way but enough of a celebrated futurist to have people asking for signatures on his Wired magazine cover story.

Evelyn is the more focused half of the couple, eager to raise money for the practical applications of Will's ideas, which means attendance at an Evolve the Future conference where the good doctor talks about the lure of what he calls transcendence.

"Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology," he says. "Its analytical power will be greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. Imagine such an entity with the full range of emotions, even self-awareness."

For some people in the audience, that is not a dream but a nightmare. These are the members of RIFT (Revolutionary Independence From Technology, if you must know), "Unplug" tattoos on their forearms and anarchic mayhem in their hearts. In fact their leader, Bree (Kate Mara), looks so clearly deranged it's amazing she was even allowed in the auditorium.

RIFT soon does its worst, and as an end result Will ends up with only a few weeks to live. Though the couple's best friend, Max, expresses doubts, Rebecca sees only one way out, a scenario that involves yet another acronym, PINN.

That would be the Physically Independent Neural Network artificial intelligence system Will has created. Rebecca decides to upload her husband's mind to PINN's core. "We can save him," she insists to Max's dismay, and though the experiment appears to succeed, the much more complex question becomes: at what cost to humanity.

Once Will is fully inside the machine, "Transcendence's" main action begins and the film becomes more involving. Because Depp's mechanical performance is nothing to write home about, the film counts on Hall's great ability to join intelligence with empathy. (Those who haven't seen her and "Spider-Man" Andrew Garfield co-star in the first part of 2009's "Red Riding Trilogy" should catch up now.)

Initially, what we see is all the things this smartest-entity-ever puts into motion, how it keeps itself alive and how it works to increase its range and power. Just as interesting, however, are the conflicts, doubts and fears that Will's transformation causes, not the least of them being Max's worry about whether that it is really Will inside the machine and not some bizarre iteration with a mind of its own.

Most pointed is the resistance many of "Transcendence's" characters feel to Will's evolution into what they call "an unnatural abomination and a threat to humanity." Are their qualms justified, or is it a question that, as someone says, "people fear what they don't understand." These are very difficult questions, and the best thing about "Transcendence" is that it refuses to pretend otherwise.

Johnny Depp Stars in ‘Transcendence’

Johnny Depp, who’s built a brilliant career despite many of his lamentable film choices, may not be the first actor you think of to play a genius — much less humanity’s destroyer or savior. But he’s weirdly perfect in “Transcendence,” an inelegant, no doubt implausible (maybe not) science-fiction film about a futurist whose consciousness is uploaded onto the Internet. There, he (or a mysterious vestige of his being) expands like the universe, growing larger and mutating into a being who is godlike and yet far from divine, sort of like a star at the apex of his popularity.

Directed by Wally Pfister, a cinematographer making his feature directing debut, “Transcendence” is a dark, lurchingly entertaining pastiche of age-old worries, future-shock jolts, hot-button topics and old-fashioned genre thrills. It was written by Jack Paglen, who, while researching, probably thumbed through Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus,” along with some Isaac Asimov and William Gibson. The scientist here is Will Caster (Mr. Depp), whose work in artificial intelligence has landed him on the cover of Wired magazine. (Even in a brave new world, old media remains useful shorthand.) With his wife, Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), a computer scientist, Will has created PINN, one of those supermachines with sleek surfaces, blinking lights and pulsating menace.

The twist in “Transcendence” is that the scientist becomes the monster of his own creation or so it seems. Shortly after the film opens, Will is shot by an extremist during a series of coordinated attacks on high-tech targets. He survives the initial assault only to succumb to the radiation that laced the bullet.

As he lies dying, Evelyn, in one of those eureka moments that implies her brain is as infinite as her husband’s, initially uploads Will’s consciousness into PINN, a clever bit of business she manages with their friend Max Waters (a solid Paul Bettany), a neurobiologist. One minute Will looks like a tortured lab monkey; the next, he’s the ghost in everybody’s machine. Well, it sounds plausible or at least Mr. Pfister moves fast enough that you don’t have time to puzzle over niceties like logic.

Like some other notable machine-based intelligences — including the ship’s computer in the original “Star Trek,” CORA in the television series “Battlestar Galactica” and Samantha in Spike Jonze’s recent film “Her” — PINN has a female voice. It may be that the enduringly creepy legacy of HAL 9000, the mutinous computer from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” has made it tougher for male voices to fill in these disembodied characters. Whatever the case, while artificial intelligences with any kind of human voice seem at once familiar and uncanny, further blurring the line between makers and their machines, those with female voices also suggest another creation story, that of Adam (the origin) and Eve (the product). “Transcendence” plays with this idea, and it’s not for nothing that its heroine is named Evelyn.

Once Will’s consciousness is uploaded, his voice supplants PINN’s. In its initial poetic fragmentation, the voice emanating from Evelyn’s reconfigured supercomputer sounds amusingly like Marlon Brando’s tape-recorded ramblings as Colonel Kurtz in “Apocalypse Now.” (Mr. Depp and Brando were friends.) After some throat clearing, though, Will starts to sound like himself and the movie gets its crazy on.

His image pops up on screen, like some holographic specter, a kind of rebirth that thrills Evelyn and freaks out most everyone else, including, naturally enough, the extremists. Implausibly led by a scowling half-pint, Bree (Kate Mara), they try to stop Will and Evelyn, in a chase that also pulls in other scientists and government agents played by the likes of Morgan Freeman and Cillian Murphy.

Mr. Pfister, shooting on film and working with the cinematographer Jess Hall, gives “Transcendence” the dark, gleaming surfaces that gloss up a lot of contemporary thrillers and which can’t help evoking Christopher Nolan’s work. 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. When Evelyn walks down one of its luminous white halls, she looks as if she’s headed right for one of Bruce Wayne’s lairs.

These visual echoes don’t hurt “Transcendence,” and they soon recede amid the escalating narrative noise. Mr. Pfister handles the predictable third-act action booms adequately — it must be contractual that every director who makes a thriller these days must blow his sets to smithereens — but he’s better when the story scales down.

When Evelyn appears in that white hallway, Mr. Pfister is showing off the production design, but he’s also bringing you close to a woman who, as Will’s power expands, is becoming progressively more isolated. One of those actresses who always seem smart even in dumb roles, Ms. Hall is very sympathetic as a woman in love and then in fear who, scene by scene and with palpable tenderness, takes over the film as Will gobbles up the world.

To an extent, “Transcendence” can be filed alongside other movies about fanaticism that have emerged since Sept. 11. Yet, for all its topical gloss and technobabble, it also draws from older, familiar preoccupations about the nature of being, which, along with Mr. Pfister’s eye and largely smooth handling of his actors, accounts for its modest pleasures.

However predictable and ridiculous, the film raises the question of what — as the machines rise — makes us human and why, which certainly gives you more to chew on at the multiplex than is customary these days. In “Frankenstein,” the monster tells his creator, “I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel.” This is the warning that pulses through many dystopian fictions and which here finds another beat.

“Transcendence” is rated PG-13. (Parents strongly cautioned.) Dystopian violence.

Wally Pfister's sci-fi thriller 'Transcendence,' starring Rebecca Hall, Johnny Depp and Paul Bettany, consulted neuroscience and nanotechnology experts to tell its artificial-intelligence tale.

Shortly before he began shooting his new artificial-intelligence thriller "Transcendence" last year, filmmaker Wally Pfister flew Jose Carmena and Michel Maharbiz, a pair of UC Berkeley scientists, to his office in Los Angeles. Professional consultants are common on Hollywood movies, but they're not usually this advanced — Carmena studies neuroscience and Maharbiz is a nanotechnology specialist — and even fewer go deep into the weeds with directors.

For ‎10 hours, the men pored over the script with the intensity of lab researchers on the verge of a major discovery. They discussed the density of brain signals, the limits of nanotechnology and the vexing problem of defining consciousness scientifically.

"We went through line by line, hitting on a technical topic and just going through it with Wally and his team," said Maharbiz, whose journal articles come with titles such as "Can We Build Synthetic, Multicellular Systems By Controlling Developmental Signaling in Space and Time?" "I've almost never seen people want to understand it at that level," he added.

Science-fiction movies have looked at the possibility and peril of artificial intelligence since HAL sought to destroy Dave Bowman in "2001: A Space Odyssey" back in 1968. Sarah Connor would of course later try to beat back the malicious plans of Skynet in the Terminator" franchise, and Hugo Weaving's coolly robotic Agent Smith proved a slippery foe for Neo and friends in "The Matrix."

But few in this subgenre have examined the theme with the level of scientific rigor — or, for that matter, the emotionally inflected story line — of "Transcendence." Thanks to the emerging intelligence of digital creations, Pfister and screenwriter Jack Paglen are able to indulge in a science fiction that, while fantastical, is both plausible and plausibly human.

Written by first-timer Paglen and marking the directorial debut of Pfister, the Oscar-winning cinematographer and longtime Christopher Nolan collaborator, "Transcendence" concerns an artificial-intelligence researcher named Evelyn Caster (Rebecca Hall) who uploads the consciousness of her husband and professional partner Will (Johnny Depp) just before he dies from a gunshot wound inflicted by an anti-technology radical. She is hardly engaging in disinterested science: Will is the love of her life, and the possibility that a digital replica can keep him with her is too powerful to resist, no matter the consequences.

In the ensuing weeks, the entity voiced and embodied by Will not only gains consciousness but evolves past the point of mere human abilities, engaging in superhuman activity in the interest of bettering society (he says). In the process, the digital Will provoke fear — maybe justified, maybe not — on the part of the couple's close friend, the fellow researcher Max (Paul Bettany), as well as a swelling cadre of government authorities fearful of a force they can't control.

With its action set pieces and propulsive plot, the $100-million-budget "Transcendence" is an unmistakably Hollywood confection. Yet with its slowed-down moments hashing out questions of digital consciousness and human evolution, it also puts complex philosophical issues at the fore.‎ ‎The film essentially offers the man-vs.-machine tension of "The Matrix" — only this time there's a decent chance we should be rooting for the machine.

This is not 'point the laser and zap the guy to death.' These are real human beings faced with something large," Depp said. "It's something the audience is really meant to ponder."

At a moment when sophisticated computer assistants like Siri are a part of everyday life, the movie poses timely questions. Can technology be harnessed to improve our lives or is it a force, once unleashed, that can't be controlled? Is our current, human-centric form of existence one that future generations will see as idyllic or primitive?

In a culture of big-budget moviemaking that tends to investigate socially relevant issues years after the fact, if it does so at all, "Transcendence" looks forward, asking questions we will soon be forced to think about — and, for all the movie's entertainment value, implicitly urges us to start thinking about them now.

Despite the theoretical premise, the movie is also set in a world that looks like the one we inhabit today. "I wanted it to feel like science fiction but contemporary science fiction, with as few leaps as possible," Paglen said. "The root question is how far would you go to save your loved one, and that's going to be more pressing if it looks and feels like our world."

Or as Hall put it, "This is set in a world I know. This isn't tinfoil helmets and spaceships."

Real considerations

Some may have yet to become intimately familiar with concepts like the singularity or a transhumanist future. Chances are, though, that our great-grandchildren will. Or perhaps our great-grandbots.

The idea of the singularity — investigated by scientists such as San Diego State's Vernor Vinge and popularized by the author and Google futurist Ray Kurzweil — argues that computer technology is evolving so fast it will eventually enhance or combine with human consciousness.

How this great meld will happen is a matter of debate. Humans may incorporate digital technology into their cognitive processes as a Darwinian hedge, says one school of thought. Or consciousness could be uploaded ‎to machines. But whatever the method, the questions are rich. At bottom, they ask both how they will change our lives and what it will mean to be human.

Carmena and Maharbiz are skeptical of anything too radical happening quickly — though they admire the brio of the film they worked on and visited the set for ("It does a great job of exploring the tension between the ground truth of science and what could be the science-fiction consequences," Marhabiz said)-- ultimately Carmena articulates their belief that "No one knows what consciousness is, and that's what makes this all so difficult."

Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering, predicts an era where man and machine merge by 2045 - but the reality of the technology may be different, an Oxford expert predicts.

In the upcoming Christopher Nolan film Transcendence, Johnny Depp plays an artificial intelligence researcher who downloads his mind into a computer to cheat death - becoming immortal, and in the process, something not quite human.

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, predicts that by 2045, such technology will actually be here, as the invention of artificial intelligence catapults humanity into a new era - and “mind uploads” will herald immortality.

Other scientists are more cautious - but many agree a technology allowing the storage of minds outside the body is likely to arrive this century.

Predicting the advent of such technology  is easier than it is to predict the birth of artificial intelligence, says Dr Stuart Armstrong of Oxford’s Institute for the Future of Humanity.

Armstrong warns, though, that the technology will probably not arrive as early as Kurzweil’s prediction, and may be rather different from his vision of a world of artificial intelligences “merging” happily with humans.

“There is some uncertainty about mind-uploading,” says Armstrong, “But unlike artificial intelligence, it’s based on past trends in technologies we know.”

“We can predict it based on when computers will achieve certain levels of processing power, and there we’ve got Moore’s law, predicting processing speeds. We can predict brain-scanning technology, based on past trends - and the ability of computers to knit the scanned images into a functioning model.”

“There is a probability distribution,” says Armstrong. His graph shows a probability that “peaks” somewhere around the year 2070 - 25 years after Kurzweil’s prediction.

Kurzweil’s idea of the future is somewhat different. He predicts that the ongoing increase in computing power will lead to an event he describes as The Singularity around the year 2045, where artificial intelligence will be born, and man will merge with machine and become immortal.

“Kurzweil is by far the best predictor of artificial intelligence I have ever seen,” says Dr Armstrong. “Compared to the others, he’s great. But he is not very good. He sees artificial intelligence as happening, and if AI happens properly, some form of upload is possibly part of that. He gets wishy-washy about this idea of “merging” - but at least he takes time to decompose the problem a bit.”

Armstrong says that AI enthusiasts tend to assume that increases in computing power will lead, inevitably to “intelligent” machines - i.e. computers which can assess and solve new problems by themselves, like humans. Kurzweil believes that the arrival of such machines will usher in a new era of immortal, uploaded humans.

Armstrong believes that the gulf between computers today and a “general intelligence” is far greater than AI fans believe - and says that knowing whether “uploaded” humans are conscious “opens up a lot of complex, philosophical questions.” Even in terms of basic skills, computers are still far off the capacity of a human.

“If someone from 20 or 30 years ago saw IBM’s supercomputer Watson, they would be certain that we had an AI now,” he says. “It’s a computer that can talk - and win at Jeopardy. But it solves that problem with something very different to a human mind.”

“Kurzweil is wrong because, no one is good at predicting artificial intelligence, because it’s never happened,” says Armstrong. “No one has ever built an AI. Kurzweil has this sort of hand-wavy moment where computers become better, and then AI arrives.”

Armstrong, who, with colleagues, rated the accuracy of some of Kurzweil’s previous predictions, centred on the year 2009, found that he had an (impressive) accuracy of around 42%. Kurzweil rated himself as a much more respectable 90%, Armstrong says.

Predicting the advent of AI is harder than Kurzweil and other advocates believe, Armstrong says. “It depends on when people are going to have insights,” he says, “And write algorithms that do AI. We don’t know what insights they need to have. Predicting that is very hard.”

Armstrong says that the temptation to imagine that AIs will be similar to us is a mistake. “They might be extremely alien,” he says. “They  might have tastes completely incomprehensible to us.”

What is certain is that we will continue to merge with technology - but not in the cyber-Utopian way that Kurzweil imagines.

“We’re already merging with the machines in a lot of ways, if you were to go without your cellphone, you would find life a lot harder,” he says. “We have much less mastery of facts thanks to Google and Wikipedia. We’re restructuring our brains, and have developed the skills to use these tools - like we’ve outsourced a part of our minds.”

“Even if artificial intelligences and uploads never happen, we’re going to merge with technology - a soft merging,” says Armstrong. “Brain interfaces, where brains connect to computer components are undoubtedly going to get better. But the idea that suddenly we’ve outsourced enough of ourselves, there will suddenly be AI's out there - you cannot assume that.”