Raises interesting questions, but goes beyond the believable

Rating: 7/10 (22 June 2014)

Theodore Twombly is coming off of a difficult divorce and buys a product that represents several generations down the road from contemporary smart phones. This product not only can interpret and respond to simple requests, but it can also interact pretty much as if it were human. Theo is asked some basic questions to initialize the device and the next thing you know he is engaged in conversation with the operating system. There are some clever interchanges like when the OS asks if Theo wants to have a female or male voice and he chooses female. Theo then asks the OS what its name is and the answer is "Samantha." When he asks how the OS came up with that name it (she) responds that she had searched through several hundred books of names and that is the one she liked the best. The idea that a computer could search through that many books in a few seconds was a good starting point to understand some of Samantha's talents. This is all quite believable, but shortly things start heading into the realm of science fiction (which does not mean that it is beyond imagination) when Samantha starts to develop a human personality.
It has been the (mostly unrealized) goal of artificial intelligence to produce machines that can learn from experience and imitate human behavior. Samantha realizes this in being able to learn how to be human. That is well done here as we see Samantha's gradual evolution taking place, ultimately going beyond human experience. When Samantha first comes on as a gently supportive presence I was forced to ask myself just how far I would go along with this if it happened to me. In her early development Samantha would get high marks as a psychiatrist and I could see entertaining her judgments as worthy of consideration. Suppose you were interacting with what you thought was a human only to be told it was a machine? Would you then discount it? When does human/machine interaction go beyond a human's simply regarding a computer as a machine that can be unplugged? Humans do have a tendency for anthropomorphizing even inanimate objects, for example some children's stuffed animals can seem quite real to them and some robots have endeared themselves to people. How far can this be taken?
Joaquin Phoenix plays the lonely everyman Theo quite well. I did have a problem with the scene where Theo has a blind date with the sexy Olivia Wilde. She comes on to him so strongly that it was hardly believable that such a beautiful woman would be turned on by such an ordinary man on a first date. Oddly, the star of the move is Scarlett Johansson who is the voice of Samantha. Indeed, it would be hard to resist a computer that had such a pleasing voice. Imagine what this movie would have been if the computer had had the male voice of Jerry Lewis. I rather liked Amy Adams in this and Rooney Mara, as Theo's ex-wife, had a great scene with Theo in a restaurant.
I would have liked this movie better if it have stayed on this side of the possibly believable, but it is entertaining as is.