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 Surrogates /Bruce Willis: Surrogates/ movie comments |
| Date: 2009-12-16 20:22:29 |
User: Buy Truy |
I thought a lot about all those people playing WoW while watching Surrogates. All those Second Lifers, all those telecommuters, all those folks who--like me--mostly live through their computer. How much of a leap would it be from our world to one where we no longer go outside at all--where beautiful robots take our place while we control them like online avatars? I believe the future may hold something like that for us, and the plausibility of that scenario gives Surrogates its strongest elements.
Less strong is the story in and of itself, another go 'round of corporate-controlled cultures and the sinister conspiracies that may bring them all crashing to the ground. Director Jonathan Mostow throws a few curve balls into the mix to keep us on our toes, but at the end of the day, the leftovers are still pretty stale. Thankfully, they tie in to the central premise exceedingly well. With everybody operating their own personal robot, numerous social problems vanish in a puff of smoke. Crime drops to nearly nothing, accidents are no longer fatal, and diseases disappear since no one goes outside anymore to spread the contagion. A few hold-outs reside in walled up reservations--refusing to play the world's newest reindeer game--but the rest of us have quite happily gone along with the program.
The fly in the ointment entails a new weapon which not only destroys "surrogates" but fries the brain of whoever is hooked up to them. With murder largely a thing of the past, the first use of the device draws FBI attention. Agents Greer (Bruce Willis) and Peters (Radha Mitchell)--both operating surrogates of their own--take the case, which soon leads them to the inventor of surrogate technology (James Cromwell) and a flesh-and-blood revolutionary (Ving Rhames) convinced that the robots are an abomination.
As a narrative, it barely passes muster. Tired whodunit clichés substitute for legitimate drama, action sequences remain distressingly arbitrary, and important developments always seem to come down to simply typing a code into a keyboard before the world blows up. Some developments hold a little more gas in their tank--including the inevitable moment when a supposedly real person turns out to be a surrogate--but they can't paper over the film's considerable logic holes. The killing which started it all eventually collapses under the contradictory evidence of later revelations, and child-like simplicity of the final scene draws the bad guy's entire methodology into serious question.
Surrogates works far better in the abstract: in the way it thinks this world through and the issues which arise in the process. The human beings here are pasty and doughy and have faces full of wrinkles. They haven't been out of their homes in years, content to hide behind the gorgeous façade and live life by proxy. Mostow gets a lot of mileage out of revealing who these characters really are--including Willis, who's never been afraid to look awful for a role and whose character must eventually stumble out of his Barca lounger and into the big, bad world. Agoraphobia, emotional detachment and the harsh reality of participating in a car chase where no one but you can get hurt all combine for a fascinating study on social dynamics (as well as casting ominous questions about the things we lose for all of our electronic convenience). Surrogates takes the time to ponder the answers, and had it concentrated more fully on that equation, it might have entered the realm of great sci-fi.
Sadly, the needs of big-screen formula derail the better angels of its nature. Surrogates represents a big step up from Gamer (which tackled the same issues without one-tenth of the competence), but its flimsy narrative still can't handle the elegance of its overall conceit. The ideas on display may prompt plenty of fruitful discussions in the coffee shop after the screening, but that still doesn't add up to a satisfying experience in and of itself. Two or three more script drafts and they might really have had something. As it is, we can do little more than enjoy what we can and ponder what might have been. |
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