Surrogates

(2009)
I wound up my viewing of the first season of NCIS early this weekend and so had time to take in a movie or two. I scrolled through the Netflix streaming selection and came across this film from last year that I had vaguely recalled seeing something about. I chose it largely because Bruce Willis occasionally still does some good work, and it was only an hour and a half. Surrogates is set in the near future; the premise is that everyone stays at home in their jammies and has perfect robot shells that they control remotely that do all their work for them. It doesnt make a lot of sense, but I think they were trying for a bit of early 70s sci-fi, you know, where the metaphor about society is more important than the story making sense (Logans Run, Silent Running, etc.). Willis plays an FBI agent who becomes involved in a murder investigation when someone destroys one of the robot surrogates and the user is also killed, which obviously isnt supposed to happen. Through the course of the investigation he discovers that theres a new weapon that can fry the robots and their users, and that whomever was using it was actually trying to kill the initial creator of the robots, played by James Cromwell (more or less reprising his role from I, Robot). When Willis surrogate is damaged while trying to obtain the weapon, he must go out on the street by himself and experience life not from a simulation chair but first hand. Oh, and Rahda Mitchell plays his partner. Some of the movie is clever the surrogates are all physically perfect, and their make up suggests Barbie and Ken dolls. Rosamund Pike plays Willis wife and she plays the dichotomy between metallic avatar and gross, sloppy human quite well (the only real difference with Willis is that his droid has hair). But a lot of the movie bends and contorts just to carry out its unlikely premise that we would allow the virtual world to overlap into reality. Theres some suggestion made about the superficiality of the modern world and the preoccupation with appearance, but before the movie can become smart enough to actually make a point, it becomes preoccupied with its weak plot, and does a have your cake and eat it at the end. While some of the performances are okay, really what youre looking at is someone saw I, Robot and wanted to do their own version. There are too many similarities, and frankly, while that film wasnt rocket science, this movie isnt smart at all. There are far too many unanswered questions why would you pilot a robot that would drive a car? Wouldnt most restaurants go out of business? Why would you work a 9-5 job if you had a body that would never tire? for this movie to be anything but mindless entertainment on a rainy Sunday afternoon (actually I watched it on Saturday). If youre going to try to make me think, which Surrogates clearly aspires to, you cant yourself be stupid. If you havent heard of this movie, or havent seen it, theres no real reason to change that. July 19, 2010