A Strangely Lifeless Substitute
by Josh K-sky on Sep.27, 2009, under Movies
The movie Surrogates takes an intriguing premise, deploys it without sense, and misses every opportunity to rescue it.
In 2017, 99% of human beings have given up on leaving the house, preferring instead to do their business via a remote-controlled robot, colloquially a surrey. Means present no obstacle, agoraphobia is presumed a natural condition, and the shape of daily life does not change substantially. Very well; Twilight Zone episodes have asked more of your suspension of disbelief.
An intriguing non sequitur has it that crime is the faintest shadow of its pre-surrogacy self. People don’t, it seems, use their surrogates to break into their neighbors’ apartments and rob or diddle their desensitized plugged-in selves. Again, very well; but when a weapon proves capable of killing people via their avatars, a shock to the system is suggested — it’s the first homicide in a long time — and discarded almost immediately.
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Surrogates is in the presentation, by the actors, of a slightly distant and robotic affect. This isn’t easy, but neither is it interesting to watch, and it becomes impossible to care about the characters. A central character, played in human form by the compelling and lovely Jamie Cromwell, has six different surreys in play throughout the movie. Though an interesting premise, this prevents the audience from forming any kind of relationship with a chief antagonist.
Failure abounds. A critical reveal about an anti-surrogacy leader named The Prophet and played by Ving Rhames takes place in front of a minor character; the surprise isn’t permitted to rise to the level of a cheap thrill. The movie offers neither an avid defense nor a substantial critique of surrogacy; you can send your surrogate to a club and jump off a balcony or screw a stranger, but it doesn’t tickle the id the way, say, the virtual reality in Caprica does. And the opportunity to satirize mass-media fear-mongering remains entirely latent. Not only is Bruce Willis’s protagonist ambivalent about surrogacy from the start, depriving the story of either a conversion or a catharsis, but his ambivalence is rooted in that cheapest of tragedies, the death of a child. On top of that, the action sequences are undermined by careless editing.
I liked the preview…
…mostly because Bruce Willis’s surrogate makes him look like he’s had awful plastic surgery in the high Hollywood tradition, and it’s comforting when the film reveals his appropriately aged human self. One could imagine a satisfying B-movie mash-up of The Matrix, Blade Runner, Minority Report and “The Picture of Dorian Grey”, but sadly, this one wasn’t it.