June 27, 2010: Surrogates
I watched Surrogates because I wanted to sit down and watch a movie but only pay about 60-65% attention to it while I did some dull tasks for work one evening, so I needed to make an appropriate selection. I understood this to be a middling sci-fi concept flick, with some star power in the form of Bruce Willis, but which disappeared pretty quickly out of theatres. I was presented with a thoughtful if unremarkable vision of a society with technology adoption taken to extremes.
Set in San Diego in the near future, society has transformed over the past decade or so as the technology has improved for robot “surrogates” to go out in the world and represent individual people. These surrogates are now very accurate animatronic representations of their masters, except that they are most often made up to resemble the people at the peak of their attractiveness and fashionability. As people lie inside special sensory chairs in their small apartments to control the surrogates, they become pallid and overweight, as the thin and beautifully made up surrogates go about their business for them. It becomes uncommon for any flesh and blood people to actually go outside their homes. When a few freak occurrences add up to suggest that using surrogates can be dangerous or even fatal, Bruce Willis is called in to investigate, and ends up being jarred back into a world of humanity, reminded that he misses seeing other real people as he uncovers the multi-layered conspiracy.
This is an interesting premise, and the setup covers a bunch of the peculiarities of this new society. For example, crime rates have dropped to near-zero since people more or less don’t go out in public anymore. The surrogates are strong and fast, so being hit by cars or having other physical accidents cause no real consequences (used to comic effect during a car chase later in the film). It has become so rare for actual humans to be out in public that they are referred to as “meatbags”. The surrogates have a plastic and unreal look to them, and most real people are unshaven and otherwise unkempt. The company which created and markets the surrogates uses the tagline “Life…Only Better”.
I found it hard to believe that society could be so easily taken over by this way of life, going from monkey brain testing to near-complete human usage in only 14 years, but it doesn’t take too many examples from real life to realize that this is exactly what people do all the time. Internet usage went from being a curious academic tool to a widespread and almost essential consumer utility in the span of a decade. Texting and tweeting and the mobile device lifestyle are an even closer analogue, making people’s actual physical presence anywhere a mere formality, since they can communicate with anyone anywhere anytime and see video and photos and hear first-hand accounts of what’s happening to…anyone anywhere anytime. That transition didn’t take much more than a decade to happen, and it has taken over. Bruce Willis’ character is obviously uncomfortable with the surrogate lifestyle and craves human contact with his wife, with whom he lives in an apartment but whom he is not even allowed to see (except for her beautiful surrogate, of course). I wondered how society could be so completely duped, but doesn’t everyone know a few technological luddites who refuse to carry a cellphone or to use email or to tweet or to use Facebook or to use a GPS to navigate? Do these people, who promote a slower and more peaceful, personal lifestyle, have a point? Of course they do, but it doesn’t stop the endless technological push which captures the mindshare of the majority of society. An important point the movie tries to make is that you can’t take back technology and move backwards, unless there’s a major catastrophe which forces it to happen, which is what the villain in the movie is trying to do, if in fact we can call this person a villain. That’s the big question. What is the right thing to do?
Bruce Willis eventually abandons his surrogate and infiltrates a human camp in order to get to the bottom of the crisis, and is surprised more than once by the layers of deception, but he comes to realize that the death and destruction has a purpose and that the purpose, beyond being righteous, may also be right. Faced with a choice at the end, he has to weigh the valid points of view of several of the people he has encountered, and decide what is best for the world. It won’t be best for everyone, but hard decisions never are. Individuals have lost sight of the bigger picture, but Willis has regained that larger view, and comes to wish he hadn’t.
Surrogates isn’t a terrible movie, but it’s nothing special either. The concept is sound, and the execution is neither here nor there. If I had to pinpoint my major complaint, it would be the casting of James Cromwell, who is an intense and versatile actor, but he seems to have been typecast over the past 15 years or so, and a movie now tips its hand through his mere presence. I knew from his first scene how his character would likely fit into the story, and I was not proven wrong. I liked him as the dorky but loving dad in Revenge of the Nerds (1984) and the pig farmer in Babe (1995), and I liked his current repeating character the first two or three times (notably in L.A. Confidential in 1997), but he needs to branch out a bit more. Don’t bother with Surrogates. Read a respected sci-fi story instead, or maybe even the comic book Surrogates was based on.
Good concept. Great potential. Mediocre execution.
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