Dumb Surrogates Sci-Fi Silliness
Sometime in the near future, human beings have stopped living their own lives and instead carry out their day-to-day activities in the plastic perfect shells of robotic surrogates. There is no pain, no fear and virtually no crime, the world a virtual utopia where just about anyone can achieve their dreams of physical perfection beyond anything they could have imagined just a few short years prior.
Radha Mitchell and Bruce Willis go plastic in Touchstone Pictures' Surrogates
But all is not as it seems, FBI agents Greer (Bruce Willis) and Peters (Radha Mitchell) on the trail of a murder capable of destroying a surrogate and killing their user all with a single electronic blow. Suddenly disconnected from his own robotic doppelganger, Greer must venture into the real world for the first time in ages in order to solve a mystery reaching into the highest echelons of power. As he does so he begins to come to the realization that a life lived behind the eyes of a facsimile isn’t a life at all, and while this villain’s ultimate goals are despicable the reasons behind them in and of themselves might not be.
Surrogates is dumb. Big, bloated and worst of all boring, it takes its relatively solid B-movie Philip K. Dick meets Japanese anime premise and does very little of interest with it. While veteran action director Jonathan Mostow (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Breakdown) stages a couple of outstanding chase sequences, and while Jeff Mann’s (Tropic Thunder) production design fits the bill nicely, overall this is as preposterously idiotic a science fiction spectacle as anything I’ve had the displeasure of seeing this year.
On the plus side, Michael Ferris and John Brancato – who also brought us the seriously silly if equally as potentially interesting script for Terminator Salvation – have inadvertently transformed the popular graphic novel this is based on into an unintentional laugh riot. The movie is so insanely ludicrous yet played with such a stoically serious face it is impossible not respond with a flurry of guffaws and giggles. I pretty much smiled all the way through it, and somebody shoot me but even when they introduced subplots involving a dead child and a dreadlocked religious prophet (played by a clearly disengaged Ving Rhames) I almost couldn’t help but openly snicker.
I must admit, the look of the surrogates themselves is eerie and somewhat intoxicating. They have a plastic CGI sheen that’s amazingly realized, the first glimpse of Willis and Mitchell a startlingly effective one. There is also something about Rosamund Pike (playing Greer’s aloof wife Maggie) that I just can’t put my finger on, her performance having a wistful, almost haunting quality to it that’s both ill-suited to the material while also strangely mesmerizing.
Still, Surrogates isn’t very good. The mystery is ponderous, figuring it out about as difficult as adding one plus one. Additionally, the final solution is just mind-boggling in its lunacy, the whole thing about as believable as Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith uploading a computer virus into an alien mothership’s operating system. It doesn’t work, and while a scene near the end of Willis and Pike is oddly touching getting there is such a misbegotten snore I’m not sure audiences will still be awake to notice it.
Film Rating: ê1/2 (out of 4)
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