Starring Johnny Depp and Rebecca Hall. Rated PG. Opens Friday (April 18)

Transcendence is like the HAL–meets–Max Headroom form that Johnny Depp takes in the movie: a cypher—a big-screen image that looks great but lacks heart and depth. It’s B-movie shallowness dressed up with A-list actors and atmospheric visuals.

That is not to say it’s unenjoyable. But the ambitions and deep philosophical questions about artificial intelligence and Internet vulnerability that it sets up in its first act are disappointingly abandoned for special effects and things that go boom. Think a technophobic Her with handheld missiles.

When AI expert Dr. Will Caster (Depp) finds out he’s dying, he agrees to let his wife (Rebecca Hall) “upload his consciousness” to a massive computer system—to let him “live” on. But soon his digitized self, appearing via flat-screen monitor, is tapping into the Internet, transferring money into his wife’s account, and persuading her, naturally, to build a massive, multimillion-dollar subterranean computer bunker in the desert, where he can continue to process information and gain power. When an anticomputer terrorist group and the government get wind of the operation, they try to stop him from… Well, no one’s quite sure what.

Depp is creepily perfect as a computer-generated figure, enunciating his wife’s name, “Evelyn”, in an only slightly less disquieting way than HAL addressed Dave. But her blind devotion to his cause is predicated on the loving relationship the pair had before things went haywire, and human warmth is noticeably lacking here. Paul Bettany and Morgan Freeman do as much as they can with their roles, too, but as scientist colleagues, they’re mostly left to wring their hands.

This is Wally Pfister’s debut as a director, and the cinematographer conjures the same moody, shadowy visuals he brought to Christopher Nolan films like Memento: extreme closeups of wires going to ears or rain on windows juxtaposed with wide shots of desert solar panels. Add a soundtrack of haunting strings and electro rumbling and you have a constant feeling of doom.

What you don’t have is any logic or explanation for what Depp’s computer is able to do—from creating hybrid humans to spreading across the planet via self-replicating silvery raindrops. Presumably, the filmmakers felt their story transcended such annoying details.