Movie Review: Surrogates

Imagine a world where you never have to leave your house. Instead you live vicariously through a robotic version of you. Sounds cool, huh? Strap into your “stem chair” and you’re off, controlling a better looking version of you. You send it to work, to the store, to parties, all from the comfort of your own home. You’re hooked into its senses so you experience anything and everything it does. There’s no reason to ever go outside again!

Surrogates, the new film starring Bruce Willis, takes us to a world where almost everyone is living their lives through robots called surrogates. The commercials advertise a world free from danger, because if your surrogate is hurt or incapacitated, nothing happens to the operator. Just a few repairs and the surrogate is back to its normal, operating self.

If you could be anyone, obviously you would be a better looking someone, right? Every surrogate has a buffed look, like an extra sheen of gloss has been applied. It’s actually a pretty ingenious tactic on the filmmaker’s part. The surrogates look ever so slightly like more humanistic versions of the shiny robots that used to peddle Duracell batteries years ago.

Not everyone is high on using surrogates to do their living though. Many humans have formed anti-machine tribes. They have set up reservations in major cities offering machine-free living. A man who is simply known as The Prophet (Ving Rhames) leads the robot-hating people.

Agent Greer (Bruce Willis) is working a case for the FBI. Seems a few operators have died the exact moment their surrogate died. This is unheard of, and causes alarm seeing that surrogates are a top-selling product worldwide.

Surrogates raises some key questions, but ends up skirting around the tough answers. In what is no doubt a comparison on people becoming more dependent on technology and less dependent on themselves, what would happen if all of us could stay at home while someone else – a robot perhaps – did all our work for us? Would this breed widespread apathy, agoraphobia, and anxiety? Would we become so dependent on our surrogates, that we’d forget how to feel and act for ourselves? Is this happening now with the invention of the Internet and computers? We spend countless hours in front of screens typing in information, no doubt getting lazier and lazier. Some interesting ideas and thoughts about modern society are definitely present here.

Article Author: Aaron Peck

All of Aaron's reviews first appear in print for The Herald Journal Cache Magazine. He's also running the fledgling film site The Reel Place.com.

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