Evolution is an incredibly dumb, very parallel search over long timescales and that managed to turn blobs of carbon soup into brains because that's a useful (but not necessary) tool for its primary optimization goal. But that doesn't make carbon soup magical. There's no fundamental physics that privileges information-processing on carbon atoms. We don't have the time-scales of evolution, but we can optimize so much harder on a single goal than it can.

So I don't see how it's a movie fantasy any more than bottling up stars is (well, ICBMs do deliver bottled sunshine... uh, the analogy is going too far here). Anyway, the point is that while brains and intelligence are complicated systems there isn't anything at all known that says it's fundamentally impossible to replicate their functionality or something in the general category. And scaling will be a necessary but perhaps not sufficient component of that, just because they're going to be complex systems.