Taking a film audience into a near future version of our world, a near future with one or two major differences just fine. At least, it's fine provided that the differences are something the audience can understand. If the difference doesn't resonate, if the audience can't figure out why we as a society would ever travel down that road, the filmmakers have just made their task for the rest of the piece that much more difficult. Thus, the Jonathan Mostow directed and Bruce Willis starring Surrogates instantly gets off on the wrong foot, and the mistake is one that the film never recovers from.
The basic concept that the movie builds itself upon is that in the very near future we will be able to buy robots that not only look and feel human, but that we can control as well. Humans, according to the film, will choose to live their lives via these robots which are known as surrogates, people will sit at home all day long and let these surrogates go to work for them, relax for them, buy clothes for them, do everything for them.
Anyone who has ever seen any science fiction movie would tell you that surrogates are a bad idea. The film's opening does its best to explain how we the technology evolved in a short period of time (it apparently took fewer than 14 years for our society to be completely altered), but never puts forward any sort of convincing explanation as to why we would travel down that road. Might it be nice to be 25 and supermodel attractive for a little while? Absolutely, but the idea that we would all choose to live in such a body forever while our real ones stink and sweat in a chair in a dark room somewhere simply doesn't ring true.
Surrogates puts forward the idea that in such a world a small but incredibly vocal and radical minority would choose to leave society, putting themselves 
on semi-secluded reservations where they would not only not allow surrogates, but not allow any sort of machine in general – except, of course, guns. Though such a group of radicals is essential for the story of the film, just as the suggestion of what our society as a whole might become, the idea of how the radicals would be organized is just as foolish.
The film takes this skewed and wholly unconvincing world view and adds a couple of FBI agents hot on the trail of someone who has a device that can kill both a surrogate and the human controlling it at the same time – an idea heretofore deemed impossible. At the opening of the film the device is used to murder the son of the man who invented surrogates, as the son was borrowing one of the father's robots.
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