Surrogates takes us into a near-future world, where real flesh and blood people have been cleared off the streets and replaced by beautiful, athletic android surrogates. These are controlled by their owners, who can therefore stay at home cocooned from reality, but still able to experience everything the world has to offer as if they were doing it themselves, from sports to sex, in a more beautiful form than God gave them. The idea is that not only can you be anyone you want to be in this brave new world, but also that no matter what happens to your surrogate, you’ll always be safe. However something goes wrong when a surrogate is murdered and its controller dies at the same moment.
This is something that is supposed to be impossible and so FBI Agent Greer (Bruce Willis) goes out to investigate, or at least his surrogate does. But who is killing people, and how are they doing it? And does it have anything to do with the people who’ve refused to live their life through surrogates and have therefore been herded into ghettos, where their de facto leader, dubbed The Prophet (Ving Rhames), preaches against the android world? As the investigation goes deeper and events make it necessary, Greer realises that for the first time in many years, his real self may have to go out into the world– a terrifying prospect for anyone in a society that no longer has any concept of personal risk.
Whether you enjoy Surrogates or not is largely dependent on whether you can accept the basic set-up. The film wants to be intelligent sci-fi, and in some respects it succeeds, but as only so far as you buy the society that the film sets up. The film is satirising our console and internet connected modern generation, but it never fully deals with the repercussions of turning your entire life into The Sims, other than by offering a succession of interesting touches. Unfortunately except for these admittedly fascinating ideas, much of the rest of the world doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, or at least isn’t believable. It means that the world of Surrogates feels as artificial as the androids themselves, even if it is often quite interesting.
However, despite it being an unbelievable and sometimes illogical world, if you can get past that, plot-wise it’s a pretty fun, twisty, shell game whodunit (where you can’t even guarantee who’s controlling a surrogate, or if one person might have several versions of themselves out exploring the world), with a couple of good action sequences and nifty special effects, including a bewigged Bruce Willis surrogate given a CG facelift that makes him look a bit like a Madame Tussaud’s waxwork.
It’s also true that despite the lack of believability in much of the surrogate society, the film nevertheless has quite a few interesting things to say about a world where technology has run rampant and human beings have got lost in the mix. Indeed the computer graphics facelifts and seas of perfect but bland looking people is a great part of this, with the camera lovingly outlining every crease and wrinkle on the physically and emotionally imperfect real people, while staying distant from the somewhat eerie surrogates.
This film from Terminator 3 director Jonathan Mostow just about does the job for its relatively short 88 minute running time (you do get the feeling though that the movie was originally intended to be a fair bit longer, but a lot has been cut out, and it’s be interested to know what has been hacked out). Bruce Willis is always a safe bet with a movie like this, and he certainly helps ensure Surrogates stays watchable even while you can’t shake the feeling that its inability to create a properly believable society full of beautiful robots, means its squandering its possibilities. Even so, it should be given credit for trying a lot harder to be socially relevant than a lot of modern, brain-dead sci-fi, even if it isn’t quite as good as it might have been.
Overall Verdict: A decent sci-fi whodunit, with more than enough to keep you watching, even if it is better at offering interesting thoughts about surrogate life than creating a world that actually makes sense.
Reviewer: Tim Isaac
