IN MOST SCIENCE-FICTION FILMS, technology leads to doom, usually by way of
war. Surrogates skips the war.
In the near(ish) future Boston of Surrogates, flesh-and-blood
people spend most of their time in “stim chairs,” sleek La-Z-Boys from
which they control robotic avatars. They feel the pleasures of living
vicariously through their android surrogates—called
“surries”—and have to deal with none of the pain. It’s a world
where car accidents, muggings, cliff-dives, and plane crashes are
nothing to worry about. A dead surry is as much of an issue as a broken
down car. You buy a new one.
Everything is delightfully sterile—totally not ominous at
all—until a couple homicides jolt FBI Agent Greer (Bruce
Willis) right out of his futuristic La-Z-Boy. He and his partner Peters
(Radha Mitchell) investigate how a surry’s destruction can kill its
human controller (What?! You mean the failsafe failed?!); eventually,
they get to the inventor of surrogates, Cantor. (Cantor is apparently
played by a surrogate version of James Cromwell; one assumes the real
Cromell is elsewhere, perhaps actually acting.) It also looks like Ving
Rhames spent a day or two on the set, combing his fake dreadlocks and
playing “the Prophet,” a leader of a humans-against-surrogates hippie
commune.
While the visionary Wall-E projected a world overwhelmed by
consumerism, the land of Surrogates is driven by fear, paranoia,
and, most importantly, vanity. You can have a surrogate that is nothing
like you—as Greer says to a hot young lawyer, “For all I know,
you could be some fat dude, sitting in a stim chair with his dick
hanging out.” But for the most part, people choose a somewhat better
looking version of themselves. Recognizable, but airbrushed.
No offense to Pixar, but Surrogates does get at something the
cheery, inert fatsos of Wall-E were missing—namely,
narcissism. It’s a fairly astute concept, considering how much personal
technology use is based in digital offshoots of ourselves, from
Facebook to Twitter to e-fucking-Harmony: The rise of the machines will
truly be upon us when they help us become hotter, more productive, and,
lazier versions of ourselves. The Sims gets it. Second
Life gets it. Surrogates totally gets it.
That clever premise is lifted from a graphic novel by Robert
Venditti and Brett Weldele, and the Surrogates film is less
gritty, less noir than the namesake text. Director Jonathan Mostow
(T3: Rise of the Machines) does well in exploring the surrogate
concept, and shows little shame in swiping graphic elements from the
Terminator movies, from flesh ripping off of metal endoskeletons to
performances in which the actors behave like stiff caricatures of
themselves. The result? An amusing sci-fi concept somehow combined with
a pretty terrible action/crime/drama TV show. If you know when to pay
attention and when to make snarky comments, you might have a great
time.