Inspired by the idea of the singularity — the term coined by futurist Ray Kurzweil to describe the merger of humans and sentient machines — Transcendence stakes out a middle ground between utopian and apocalyptic visions of the decades ahead.

“I wanted to get away from the cliched notion of a sentient machine taking over the world,” Pfister said. “Is it benevolent or malevolent? I want the audience to understand both sides of it.”

In that way, the movie has a few things in common with Spike Jonze’s Her, which also looks to show the more well-rounded consequences of artificial intelligence and which similarly drew from Kurzweil. […]