Surrogates

Do they look a little funny to you?

Do you ever really sit back and think about how the future might be?  How much will technology advance in the next 50 years or so?  ‘Surrogates’ gives us a glimpse of what the future might be like, but ultimately fails to impress.

In ‘Surrogates’, most people have robots (surrogates) that are their exact twins.  People can lie in a little bed, hook some sensors to their head, and have complete control over their surrogate.  Everyone seems to live their everyday lives through these surrogates; they go to work, hang out with friends, and drive around like normal people.  You can be whoever you want to be.  Are you 45 and 100 pounds overweight?  Just buy a surrogate that looks like a 25 year old supermodel and go have a good time.  Even better, crime is almost non-existent because killing a surrogate doesn’t kill the actual owner….until now.  Yep, someone created a weapon that can kill the surrogate and the operator at the same time and Bruce Willis gets the job of getting the weapon out of the hands of the bad guys. 

Honestly, there’s not much that I really liked about this movie.  The story seems choppy – one minute Bruce Willis is chasing a guy through the streets and the next he’s at his wife’s beauty shop talking about why their marriage is falling apart.  The special effects are pretty crappy, borderline sci-fi channel at times.  And I can’t really say I cared about any of the characters.  Finding out who created the weapon and why just didn’t really interest me that much.  All that said, there are a few things I liked in this movie.  There is a weird effect they give the surrogates so that you can tell who is a surrogate and who is a regular person.  Surrogates seem to have little emotion in their face, they walk and sit very rigidly, and their skin has a very Ken Doll look to it.  I liked the idea that the technology hasn’t been perfected yet, that there is something to humanity that hasn’t been totally replicated and may never be.

For such an interesting concept, it’s too bad that this movie couldn’t have been better.  We’re really not that far away from having something like surrogate technology be available to everyone.  I’m just going to have to wait for a good movie that can really dig into some of the ethical questions that this type of technology could bring up.

Score: 3.5 out of 10