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Surrogates 

What if the world took virtual reality to the next level?

Imagine that we are all players in a giant game screen of the world, cloistered in newfangled looking beds with remote controls as a series of robots go out and live our lives.  They go to work for us, go on amazing vacations, have wild sex and experience adventures as mankind experiences it vicariously from the comfort of their own homes.  However, if we experience anything secondhand is it in any way real?

It’s not the most original plotline in the world right now.  The basic idea has been touched on by such recent and upcoming releases like Wall-E, Gamer, Avatar and Tron Legacy.  It is taken to the extreme in Surrogates – the story of a police officer (Bruce Willis) who never leaves his apartment, instead handling a series of non-threatening crimes in a world gone too happy and complacent for violence. 

It is the ultimate couch potato lifestyle.  The film kind of ignores some of the more problematic physical and emotion effects of their concept – stuff like paleness, obesity, cabin fever, bedsores and muscle paralysis....  Even an animated children's film, Wall-E, took on that obvious concern about humans living a totally sedentary lifestyle. 

Surrogates opens with a brief “historical” account of how the world became a huge hive for shut-in game players.  It makes little sense and takes quite a few logical leaps.  For example the film suggests that the Supreme Court decreed by a five to four margin that surrogates should be the new lifestyle.  Beyond the fact that I don’t believe for a second that they would actually side with that idea, the film is so ham-handed that it doesn’t even realize that the Supreme Court is part of the judicial branch of government.  The legislative branch (The House and Senate) make the laws, the Supreme Court’s job is to enforce the laws once they have been created and determine the constitutionality of said laws.

Okay, enough of the civics lecture.

Surrogates also never explains why a bunch of shut ins that never seem to leave their beds, bathrooms and kitchens would need to have some of the biggest, most luxurious and spotlessly clean homes and apartments this side of a House and Gardens photo spread. 

However, if you try to take any of this storyline logically, Surrogates will be lost on you. 

Despite some huge plot holes, Surrogates is a reasonably good piece of pulp entertainment – not high art by any means but if you shut off your mind and go for its goofy world view, you will probably rather enjoy it. 

As mentioned before, Bruce Willis plays a cop in the brave new world of surrogates.  You can tell the real Bruce from the robot one because the robot looks like he’s had a bunch of rounds of Botox and sports a terrible toupee.  Oh, and the human one emotes a little bit more. 

His calm life gets thrown for a loop when a criminal starts using a special type of electrical gun that not only fries out surrogates but also kills their users. 

This leads to a huge conspiracy cover-up which seems to envelop the police department, a rogue human settlement and the father of the surrogate movement.  Willis’ surrogate is destroyed and the man must venture out into the real world for the first time in years to solve the mystery. 

None of it is overly surprising, but some of it is surprisingly exciting.  By the time that Surrogates winds down to its pretty inevitable ending, the ride was short and intriguing enough to keep most audiences amused.

Alex Diamond

Copyright ©2010 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: January 15, 2010.

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Copyright ©2010  PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: January 15, 2010.