Surrogates Review
by Jerry Saravia (faustus_08520 AT yahoo DOT com)February 5th, 2011
SURROGATES (2009)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
RATING: Three stars
"Surrogates" is a futuristic tale that is as much of a downer as one can expect in this day and age. The future seen here is not pretty, as many cinematic equivalents have shown, but it is also very prescient, commenting on where our society might be headed with the technological innovations that occur almost annually. After seeing this film, the last thing I would ever want is a surrogate.
Surrogates are androids in the strictest sense, with even less emotional investment than the ones seen in "Blade Runner." They live the idealized lives of their human counterparts, who lay on a bed and use remote controls to dictate their surrogates' actions. Bruce Willis is a goateed FBI agent, Greer, who uses a blonde-haired surrogate cop to do his business, which includes the investigative murder of a human girl. This leads to more cop surrogates killed by some surrogate weapon that can cause the human counterpart to lose their lives as well! The twist is that the surrogate weapon was created by a human, and all humans live in their own secluded property where surrogates are not welcomed and destroyed.
Most of the criminal investigation is not nearly as fascinating as the human characters and their inabilities to move an inch outside of their homes, since the surrogates mostly walk the streets, shop, work, etc. Humans stay indoors, consume medication for perhaps anxiety, and look beat up and essentially vulnerable. What kind of private hell are the humans living when the Surrogates can zap themselves with some electronic bong that gives them pleasure, yet the humans receive no pleasure at all?
Consider one scene that echoes "Twelve Monkeys." Willis as the beleaguered cop decides to walk the streets without using a surrogate substitute. He is shaken, deterred by the reality of the outside world, as if he had been isolated for far too long. He can't even last in a fight with real humans for too long. It echoes Willis's own time- travelling character from "Twelve Monkeys," looking more frail and bewildered as only Willis can do best.
"Surrogates" does contain its share of high-voltage action scenes and surrogates leaping up and down in cartoony fashion that threaten the narrative at times, rather than enhancing it. Still, despite a far too abbreviated running time and a few too many loopholes, "Surrogates" is full of some powerful images and it features bravura acting by Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell as Willis's cop partner. Not a great film in the annals of sci-fi and futuristic fantasy, but certainly one of the most gripping and humanistic in quite some time with a stunning finish.
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