There is a tradition of excellent cinematic explorations of artificial intelligence from Alphaville to 2001 to The Matrix. However, Transcendence belongs to that subgenre of usually terrible films about the Internet.

Johnny Depp plays Will Caster, a computer scientist who is on the verge of a series of breakthroughs that would permit sentient brain functions to be uploaded into a computer, creating a human form of artificial intelligence. Hes a bit of a self-parody purporting to be publicity shy, but posing for a Wired magazine cover that he repeatedly is called upon to autograph.

His work has drawn the attention of a neo-Luddite terrorist network who believe that true artificial intelligence will make human civilization obsolete or even subservient to computer overlords.

Will is shot at point-blank range in a coordinated terrorist attack. However, thanks to some shockingly poor marksmanship, Will is only grazed in the assault.

But it turns out that the shooter has hedged against this possibility with the use of a polonium-laced bullet, and a wasting radiation sickness soon follows. Will has a few months, therefore, to lay the groundwork necessary to upload his consciousness with the help of his devoted wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and his best friend and colleague Max (Paul Bettany).

Once Will is uploaded and online, he moves quickly to squeeze money out of the stock market to provide Evelyn with funds to build a remote, solar-powered cloud computing facility deep in the desert badlands of the American West.

He lords over his creation as a ubiquitous and unsleeping image, projected like Big Brother onto thousands of high-definition monitors.

There, freed from almost all restraint, Wills intelligence expands to create computerized tools to take over and network human minds, repair bodies with nanotechnology, and even grow human tissue from scratch. Some mad scientists reanimate brains, others reformat them its just a question of technology.

Word leaks out about the restorative powers of Wills researches, and his underground lair becomes a kind of Lourdes for pilgrims seeking his healing touch. (The religious overtones are kind of tacked on, but unmistakable.)

At the same time, he also draws the attention of the authorities, including Joseph Tagger, a government scientist played by Morgan Freeman. Tagger takes charge of a surprisingly low-key effort to take down the looming global threat posed by Wills computer incarnation.

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MOVIE REVIEW: 'Transcendence'