Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
10/1/09
If Hollywood has taught us
nothing else, it's that technology A)Is inherently dehumanizing, B)Is Evil,
and C)Sucks, not necessarily in that order. And why not? From
the age of 15 or so, don't we start looking around at the people younger
than us and begrudging those whipper-snappers their various toys that aren't
at all like the stuff we had back in the day? God only knows what
the future will bring, all we know for sure is that it will be Evil and
inherently dehumanizing and, you know, suck. In the spirit of a long
line of Hollywood inventions including Soylant Green, Replicants and The
Holy Bomb come Surrogates, a pretty snazzy metaphor for the insulating
effects of the Internet Age wrapped in a diverting futuristic crime thriller.
Jonathan Mostow's film is more bemused than horrified by its' story, making
it less gripping than it might have been, but there's plenty here to entertain
Bruce Willis fans and sci-fi alarmists alike.
The year is 2017 (A lot,
apparently, is going to happen in a hurry). People have almost completely
retreated into their homes, spending their days interacting with the outside
world via robotic avatars called Surrogates. A surrogate is, essentially,
your “best self”: better looking, more fit, and capable of amazing
physical feats. Best of all, the operator in the safety of his home
faces no danger or pain no matter what his Surrogate does, and in a world
where everyone looks like a model, discrimination has magically gone away.
But not everyone buys in, and the human resistance lives in isolated communities
cut off from the Surrogate-loving government. Led by The Prophet
(Ving Rhames), they seek the fall of this artificial world, and get an
opening when the first murder in years is committed with a weapon that
kills not just the Surrogate, but the operator. FBI Agent Tom Greer
(Bruce Willis) and his partner Agent Peters (Radha Mitchell) are on the
case, but their boss Stone (Boris Kodjoe) seems more concerned about covering
up the threat to the Surrogate business than getting to the bottom of the
case. One of the victims was the son of Dr. Lionel Canter (James
Cromwell), who invented Surrogates but was forced out of his own company
over a difference of visions for its' future. It seems that the doctor
and his son routinely swapped Surrogates, meaning Canter himself might
have been the murderer's target. After all, in a world where everyone
is a robot, who can really say who's at anyone's controls?
It's in asking those sorts
of questions that Surrogates is most successful. By the end,
when one of the Surrogates gets passed from one character to another like
a rental car, writers Michael Ferris & John D. Brancato have had loads
of fun with their game of “who's driving who”. In this sense, the
Surrogates are literal versions of that nagging question you get when chatting
with someone online: how do I know this 23 year-old English woman
is 23, English, or a woman? Adapting the 2005 graphic novel by Robert
Venditti and Brett Weldele (unread by me), Ferris & Brancato stick
to the satirical surface of the material, resulting in a film that's diverting
and fun without really getting too deeply into the issues it raises.
For instance, we see several characters in their rooms without their
Surrogates and while they're slightly out of shape (and have horrible skin
for some reason), nobody's nearly as obese as the average modern American
who DOES have to go outside. I also couldn't help but wonder how
the people who were already attractive felt about having technology take
away their God-given edge.
Although he's never since
reached the heights of his crackerjack 1997 thriller Breakdown,
Mostow has proven himself a solid director of mid-range Hollywood fare,
and creates a futuristic world of surface beauty with no substance that
we can believe in, in part because he doesn't stray so far from the world
of 2009, except for the part where we're all robots. The action sequences,
involving Terminator-like resiliency by the Surrogates and lots of vehicular
damage, are well mounted.
Willis is effective as the
embittered cop who wishes he actually got to touch his wife (Rosamund Pike)
from time to time (a clear flaw in the Surrogate system). The makeup
and effects team does a great job turning him into a robotic version of
his The Jackal-era self. Mitchell is great as always in a
role that's deceptively difficult because we never really learn anything
about Agent Peters but she's still got lots to do. Pike has to work
hardest to create a distinct difference between her real self and her robot
doppelganger, and has a lot of luck doing so. Rhames, too finds just
the right creepy note for his obviously self-aggrandizing Prophet.
Cromwell can pretty much do no wrong, and doesn't.
The point of all this (aside
from the explosions, of course) is to consider the way our wiz-bang world
of online access and wireless media have taken a lot of the effort, and
as such passion, out of day to day life. Folks over 30 will probably
remember a time when a person used to REALLY want something rare or obscure
and could spend years turning over flea markets, want ads and garage sales
searching the country for it. The feeling upon actually locating
that object (or person or piece of information) was a certain kind of euphoria
that has more or less disappeared from a society with access to search
engines, social networks and eBay. Obviously there's been compensations,
like all the people we “know” we'd have never met without computers, but
as Surrogates asks, do we really know any of them as well as we
think? I'd have loved to see the filmmakers engage these questions
rather than simply ask them, but because Surrogacy doesn't seem to have
any positives for normal, healthy people (aside from a psychotic aversion
to danger that would no doubt end up making people the victims of super-viruses
that would cultivate in immune systems that hadn't been exposed to anything),
there isn't much of a debate to be had. Not that it makes the people
who oppose the Surrogates any less bonkers and creepy, but in our current
political climate, it's easy enough to believe in a debate where you still
wish the people who're right would shut up.
Surrogates is pretty
much exactly what you'd expect when you learn it's a hair under 90 minutes
long: a brisk techno-thriller that has just enough time to deliver
the entertaining goods and not quite enough to flesh out its' future world
the way you might like. A great cast picks up the slack for whatever
lack of characterization you might notice, and stuff blows up pretty good.
Similar material received a far more effective and visceral treatment earlier
this month in Gamer, but as a PG-13 companionpiece
for those unable to endure Nevaldine/Talor's directorial excesses, you
could do a lot worse. Sci-Fi fans can never get too many reminders
of the dehumanizing evils of technology. Which, you know, sucks. |
