Steven Spielberg is ramping up casting on his next directorial feature, the sci-fi actioner Robopocalypse.  Just yesterday we learned that Anne Hathaway is Spielberg’s choice to star as the female lead opposite Chris Hemswoth, and now Variety reports that Ben Whishaw (I’m Not There.) is being eyed for a key role in the film.  Based on the book by Daniel H. Wilson, the story takes place in a future where “artificial intelligence known as Archos comes online and assumes control over the global network of machines that regulate everything from transportation to utilities, defense and communication.”  Cabin in the Woods director/co-writer Drew Goddard wrote the screenplay adaptation, and former 20th Century Fox head Tom Rothman just came onboard as a producer.

Whishaw would apparently play a hacker named Lurker, should he sign on.  The actor stars in the upcoming adaptation of Cloud Atlas and plays the new Q in director Sam Mendes’s Bond film Skyfall, so we’ll be seeing much more of Whishaw in the near future.  Read the synopsis for Robopocalypse after the jump.

Here’s the synopsis for Robopocalypse:

They are in your house. They are in your car. They are in the skies…Now they’re coming for you.

In the near future, at a moment no one will notice, all the dazzling technology that runs our world will unite and turn against us. Taking on the persona of a shy human boy, a childlike but massively powerful artificial intelligence known as Archos comes online and assumes control over the global network of machines that regulate everything from transportation to utilities, defense and communication. In the months leading up to this, sporadic glitches are noticed by a handful of unconnected humans – a single mother disconcerted by her daughter’s menacing “smart” toys, a lonely Japanese bachelor who is victimized by his domestic robot companion, an isolated U.S. soldier who witnesses a ‘pacification unit’ go haywire – but most are unaware of the growing rebellion until it is too late.

When the Robot War ignites — at a moment known later as Zero Hour — humankind will be both decimated and, possibly, for the first time in history, united. [Amazon]