The Portal à la The 10th Kingdom

The plot line isn't novel at all, but I don't seem to stop delighting in films that pop aliens into the big city and engage them in tête-à-tête with jaded humans, amid the rubble of alleyways and greetings of middle fingers.

Couple:  Discover the magic.  I can't wait.
Kim:  There is no magic.
Couple:  What?  What?
Kim:  What?
Tracy:  [simply a look: what the hell?]
Kim:  There is no magic.  There's loneliness and food poisoning.

When we hear this well-acted funny exchange, we know the handsome, wacky outfitted alien and the pretty, bored to tears agent are on a collision course of romance and comedy.  The Portal follows in the footsteps of the lengthy miniseries The 10th Kingdom, and accordingly producer Laura Perlmutter notes that there are plans to turn this short film into a web series.  Tahmoh Penikett as Alar and Erin Karpluk as Kim make for an odd but fated couple.  Penelope Corrin as Tracy cinches comic acting rather well with her facial gestures and brief lines:  So lunch was good?  I love it, so I cannot wait for the web series.

Yeah Rite à la The Exorcist

I just love the takeoff on the classic horror The Exorcist (1973) and recently The Rite (2011).  By and large such films don't frighten me, because I can immerse myself in their suspense and mystery, while drawing a line on their implausibility in the back of my mind.  Moreover, I remember seeing The Exorcist with my younger brother, when we were teens, and finding myself chuckle at a few of its scenes. 

So Yeah Rite is not only a clever pun on the sarcastic American expression of disbelief yeah right, but it is also a comic turn for an otherwise frightful flick.  When the mother sighs Thanks God you're here, I hear my Arab and Indian friends in Dubai say the same thing, which sounds funny to an American ear that is used to hearing thank God, instead.  The faux black eyes, on both the girl and mother, signal from the start that we're in for an amusement ride. 

The Proposal à la Mr. & Mrs. Smith

I love this short film.  The audio job is a bit lacking.  Either that, or we needed Missy Peregrym to articulate her lines better.  But otherwise she and Peter Mooney do a fine job of enacting a clever script and brisk stunts:

She: What about the bedroom?
He: That shouldn't be an issue.
She: That's what every guy says. It always is [an issue].
He: Well, unlike most guys, I actually listen.

Of course, this short film takes after the delightful Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005), which elevates the customary repartee between lovers to deft aggression and comic relief.  Any conflictual couple, who can step back now and then and laugh things off, can delight in all of it.

Transcendence Film, Transcendence Physics (3)

(image credit)

Let’s now reflect on what in particular I find so compelling about Transcendence.  It asks three existential questions, and offers stunning answers vis-a-vis the work of Michio Kaku.

What is the essence of who we are? 

Consciousness and intelligence, maybe soul and personality. Of course the whole of who we are makes us who we are. But when we talk about essence, we get positively elemental in our focus, attention and ideas. So while the body may be the most evidential aspect of who we are, by itself it simply doesn’t define who are. Clearly for Evelyn Caster, the essence of her dying beloved husband is his consciousness.

What if we were to displace that essence from one medium (body) to another medium (machine)?

Not just any machine, of course, but rather a quantum computer. Presumably this computer has enough intelligence and infrastructure to accommodate our essence. But the film suggests that it is Will Caster’s mind that makes that computer super-intelligent and super-capable. In other words, the machine in and of itself is merely a platform or a framework. Scientists and technologists have labored for decades to create artificial intelligence; Transcendence suggests that it is inevitably human intelligence that makes machines intelligent. 

Once displaced what is the nature of our new being? 

Kaku envisions us becoming virtually boundless. We can actually ride a beam of light, just as Einstein imagined in his thought experiments, because we aren’t constrained by the physical limits of our body. We can actually explore the ends of the universe, far far more capably and efficiently than any means at our disposal. In Transcendence, it is as if a hologram of the erstwhile scientist were uploaded onto that quantum computer. But it is a hologram with wide-ranging awareness, knowledge and abilities. 

Bree | The biggest threat humanity has ever faced is one of your own making, self-aware technology. Computers control our banks, our airports, our national security, our lives. Once they are able to think for themselves, they'll use this power to destroy us, unless we fight back. We can unplug from the network. We can stop the scientists who invent these machines. We can lead the revolution that will save our species. We are RIFT [Revolutionary Independence from Technology] This is just the beginning.

Reference: Transcendence Movie Quotes.

But as with many science fiction film, all of the above inviolably takes place in a human context. There will always be people, it seems, who fear technology advancement and who fashion resistance à la the revolutionaries in history. But if we were to take a film like Transcendence as a kind of self-contained debate, nay, fight, on such matters, then we give ourselves an opportunity to work through all sorts of dilemma that science fact Kaku (rf. Dreaming in Code: Michio Kaku's Future of the Mind) and the science fiction Casters (rf. 'Transcendence': Johnny Deep in a bold, beautiful flight of futuristic speculation) seem to dismiss.

Transcendence Film, Transcendence Physics (2)

Transcript | Isaac Asimov was my favorite science fiction writer and his favorite science fiction story talked about an era far in the future, when our bodies would be in pods and we would mentally control beings, beings of pure energy that would go flying around the universe. And, of course, it was science fiction but here's the idea: mind without body. Pure consciousness roaming across the universe faster than any rocket ship. It turns out that that's actually a physical possibility.  First of all the Obama administration and the European Union are pushing the Brain Project to delineate all the pathways of the human brain. This means that one day we might have a CD ROM called Brain 2.0. That is every single neuron encoded on a memory disc, your personality, your memories, who you are, the essence of your soul would be incorporated in this disc as pure information. Even if you die your consciousness, in some sense, may live on.

Now you as an organic being will have died. That means that your [body] will turn to dust. But the configuration of neurons that made your thinking process possible can be put on a disc in which case, in some sense you become immortal. Not only immortal but this could be the most efficient way to explore the galaxy just like Isaac Asimov predicted in his short story. Let's say I take not your genome but your connectome, put it on a laser beam - in fact in the book I actually calculate how big a laser beam will be required to put your consciousness as pure photons - shine it into the heavens. You're now shooting consciousness into outer space at the speed of light. Forget booster rockets. Forget asteroid collisions. Forget radiation dangers and weightlessness and lack of oxygen. Forget all that. You are riding on a laser beam at the speed of light and then at the end there's a relay station.

A relay station which takes the laser beam and then puts into a surrogate. That is all the neural networks encoded into laser beam can be manifested as a robot on the other side of the galaxy. So in other words, it's like staying at a hotel. If you're a businessman you go from hotel to hotel and relax. The same way you'd be on a laser beam going from relay station to relay station and when you go to the relay station you take the robot body of a super human. You become superman on the other end of the rainbow. So is this a physical possibility? Yes. When might we have it? Well let's be honest. It would take perhaps a hundred years or so before we have a complete understanding of the connectome that is all the neuropathways of the brain. Perhaps another century beyond that before we have relay stations on which we could then shoot our consciousness into outer space. Is it mathematically and physically possible and the answer is yes.

Physicist Michio Kaku offers very compelling context to the 2014 film Transcendence.  The tale that Johnny Depp and Rebecca Hall tell, as scientists Will and Evelyn Caster, is truly an emerging science fact, though currently science fiction.  It is quite possible to upload our consciousness onto a supercomputer, and from there connect to the World Wide Web (aka the Internet).  In the far far future, that consciousness may be downloaded onto a flash drive (or memory stick), and shot into the heavens to co-mingle, I imagine, with the greater cosmos.  I'm sure writer Jack Paglen and director Wally Pfister very much drew on Kaku's work.

Transcendence Film, Transcendence Physics (1)

Will | For 130,000 years, our capacity to reason has remained unchanged. The combined intellect of the neuroscientists, mathematicians and... hackers... in this auditorium pales in comparison to the most basic AI. Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology. And in a short time, its analytic power will become greater than the collective intelligence of every person born in the history of the world. So imagine such an entity with a full range of human emotion. Even self-awareness. Some scientists refer to this as "the Singularity." I call it "Transcendence." 

I find this 2014 film, starring Johnny Depp and Rebecca Hall as the erstwhile scientist couple Will and Evelyn Caster, simply enthralling.  To be sure, there is quite a bit that's uncertain and frightening about what they do, but the notion of uploading our consciousness onto a super computer; shedding what a poet called a dying animal (Sailing to Byzantium, Poem by William Butler Yeats); and reconstituting our being in a vastly expansive universe is, quite frankly, stunning.  

Max | This thing [i.e. uploaded Will] is like any intelligence. It needs to grow, to advance. Right now it's settling somewhere it thinks it's safe from outside threats. Somewhere its massive appetite for power can be met. But it will want more than that. After a while survival won't be enough. It will expand, evolve, influence - perhaps the entire world.

That new being isn't just exponentially intelligent, but also godly capable.  Because the transcendent Will can manipulate nanoparticles, he can quickly heal wounded colleagues, even resurrect them from the dead, and endow them with superhuman strength.  Will can create material, build apparatus, and fabricate the high technology platform he needs to survive forever, all seemingly out of thin air.

Audience | So you want to create a god? Your own god?

Will | That's a very good question. Isn't that what man has always done?

Reference: Transcendence Quotes.

Right.