Futuristic detachment leads to humans living lives with little to no fear. The world of the ‘Surrogates’ is a place where one’s actions cannot harbor any physical health risk to one’s own body, because the surrogate robot acts out the life for its owner and takes on that danger itself.
Many science-fiction movies develop great concepts of technology running rampant over humanity, but few seem to deliver an overall– from beginning to end– good film.
Take ‘Minority Report,’ for instance, for all of its good ideas and fun scenes, it offers little reason to see it a second time.
‘Surrogates’ is one of the rare pictures to take brilliant ideas of man vs. machine and achieve an entertainingly excellent movie.
In one of Bruce Willis’s deeper roles, as F.B.I. agent Tom Greer, he walks the streets of Boston and investigates the murder of two surrogate robots and their owners. Where the world lives daily life as though it were a video game with owners plugging their bodies into a device that allows their brains to control a walking robotic life-form, modeled however they like, to be younger and as perfect as they want.
The surrogates go out and work, dance with a different beautiful body every night, have sex whenever the impulse takes hold and even do robotic drugs for them. There is no risk for the surrogate’s owner, and when a car crash or accident claims a surrogate’s life, the owner is not harmed.
The world’s crime rate quickly drops 99 percent, and racism becomes extinct, as everyone can own a surrogate and make them take on any appearance. The movie makes great strides showing this to be an unnatural way to live, as even the robots have their own ways to do drugs, showing their owner’s subconscious discontent. Adrenaline is replaced by the surrogates’ synthetic skin touching others synthetic skin without the risk of spreading disease, but also without the connection of humanity as living beings that crave physical touching with one another.
Humans cannot be harmed, even if their surrogates are killed. That was the thought that kept society intact, until Bruce Willis makes the discovery of owners being murdered while plugged in. The man Willis plays, is tortured by the death of his son, and he battles with a wife who is afraid of the world, as he takes on the growing feeling he cannot neglect, that the surrogate way of life just does not feel right.
Conspiracy, collusion, action and resistance take precedent in this thrilling look at a future that is hopefully not on humanity’s horizon. The only thing that the movie ‘Surrogates’ lacks is more content. It could have been a bit longer, to further the goodness.
