Movie Review - Surrogates

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In the new movie Surrogates Bruce Willis stars as Greer, a police officer investigating a homicide in the “not-too-distant” future.  In this brave new world, people rarely leave their house and interact exclusively via high-tech robots (called “surrogates”) that they control with their minds from the comfort of their own living rooms.  The surrogates are connected to their puppet masters neurologically so their owners can “experience” life.  The innovation leads to a decrease in violent crime since real people no longer physically interact with each other.   If someone does commit and act of violence, it’s the surrogate that is harmed not its operator.  So when a person is murdered via their surrogate, the police leap into action in an effort to prevent a nationwide panic.

Greer is the sort of no-nonsense cop that you expect from Willis.  He is in this world, but not of it.  How can you tell?  Easy…he has a record collection.  Take that, dystopian future!  He finds this new cultural shift to be disconcerting.  And clearly he’s not the only one, as there are bands of resistance that refuse to take on surrogates.  I’m not quite sure what they’re “resisting” as, best I could tell, surrogates are popular but not mandatory.  I mean hey, I didn’t like acid wash jeans but you didn’t see me setting up a rebel camp on the outskirts of Festus.

The movie purports to be heady science fiction.  But for all its high-concept bluster, it doesn’t spend much time playing in its own world.  The existence of surrogates raises a multitude of questions.  Would people choose surrogates that look like themselves or someone else?  What would constitute adultery?  If physical attributes were an easily purchasable commodity, in what ways would we redefine what constitutes “attractive?”  The movie never fully explores the implications of a world such as this.  Instead it’s satisfied being Blade Runner: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Robot Victims Unit, C.S.-AI…wait, I have more…Cyborg & Lacey, NYPD: Short Circuit...ummm…My Mother The Car 54 Where Are You?  Ok, yeah, I’m out. 

Plot holes abound and little attention is paid to detail.  They live in a world where every man, woman and child each has their own personal cybernetic substitute but the police still store records in manila folders in a filing cabinet?  Do the police even do that now?  We’re also told that the surrogates have a “fingerprint” like code that enables them to only be operated by their legitimate owner: a plot point that’s all but ignored for the last forty minutes.  In the end, we’re left with a middling detective yarn dressed up as a Philip K. Dick story.

On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Blade Runner and 1 being Small Wonder, Surrogates gets a 4.

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