Transcendent Man Trailer Offers More Evidence That Terminator May Become Non-Fiction

I've been fascinated with Ray Kurzweil since reading a Rolling Stone interview with him several years ago. In a nutshell, Kurzweil believes very strongly that humans and machines will merge within the next forty years or so, and that mortality itself will become obsolete. He's coined an entire borderline-religous movement based around the day where humans and technology merged, which he calls singularity. This wouldn't be so interesting if the guy wasn't a bonafide genius who Bill Gates and the owners of Google regularly call into meetings. So he's not a total uninformed crackpot. Also, he has a personal obsession with living to see singularity so that he will be able to resurrect his dead father. In other words, it's about time someone made a movie about the guy.

Overall, this trailer does a great job of capturing all of the intriguing quirks, contradictions and general creepiness of the singularity movement that I've read about in interviews. Kurzweil is indeed taking about forty or more vitamins and supplements a day so that he can live to the day where technology will make him immortal, and yes, part of his passion for the movement seems to be tied up into a personal obsession with his deceased father.

It's interesting to see such plain spoken, straight-faced and kind of nerdy guy acting as a prophet, but this trailer really only hits the tip of the iceberg in terms of the ideas that Kurz has tried to advance. I remember in one interview, he said something like, "You know how you would be crazy not to back up your computer now? Soon, people will say that about your brain." Hopefully there is more of this in the film. Also, getting Philip Glass to score was a stroke of genius.

Verdict: Sold!