Movie 6: Surrogates

THE FUTURE! Okay they don’t do that, cleverly it shows the progression that leads to the films setting. Cybernetic technology advances to the point where realistic looking humans can be made, with a full suite of sense, on the private market. Something like 90% of people use these Surrogates instead of walking around in their meat bags like wot we do now. No risk of disease or accidental death and you get to look however you want so everyone is pretty. Some people don’t want to live in the future equivalent of an MMO so they have set up areas in major cities for what is basically a glorified Amish. Everything is hunky dory until 2 people are murdered THROUGH their Surrogates, something that shouldn’t be able to happen. So Bruce Willis sets out to find out what the deal is.

And this being a Bruce Willis movie his Surrogate gets all fucked up about half an hour in so he has to walk about meat bag style and get all scratched and bloody and what not.

The world of Surrogates is very well thought out. Little touches like someone not being there for 30 seconds cause they were in the can (your body doesn’t stop just cause your plugged in) and the fact that the real world, well it’s all real world, the real bodies of people are a bit emaciated and rough looking cause they’re basically doing nothing all the time and not eating right help to make it feel like a solid world. It is a little hard to believe that people’s attitudes would change so dramatically in 15 years though. At least to the extent that’s shown in the film. Half the characters would have grown up in a world without Surrogates and the sophisticated level that the latest generation has would only have been around for what, 5 years? I’ll let them off with that though

And the plot itself is a pretty basic thriller type plot. But I can let them off with that too as they weren’t lazy with the setting. As long as its done well a plot can be less than original. This does have the odd twist in it though.

Some of the sub plotting felt a bit glossed over to me and could have been explored more (it’s not a very long movie) and the ending has quite a few holes in it that make it feel less worked on. It’s like the writers (think it was based on a comic actually) got wrapped up in make a cool world and forgot to make a realistic conclusion. Don’t want to give anything away though as it is a good watch.

Go check it out if its your bag. It’s Bruce Willis, he’s always good.

Next up: Freebird. Bet you’ve never heard of that one ;)