Movie and Television Reviews

Surrogates is a very good mainstream sci-fi movie with the potential to spark post-viewing conversations on human dignity.

Bruce Willis is Agent Greer, a detective in a world where people's contact with reality arrives via robots called "surrogates": people sit in their homes and control a surrogate through sensors attached to their body. The sensors provide feedback, including of the most intimate kind (surrogates go dead for bathroom visits, clean-up, etc.), from the surrogate to the operator.

The Prophet leads a small resistance movement called Dreads.

Crime and "prejudice" is down, as are communicable diseases (no communication; hence, no...). Everything seems virtually perfect when the creator of the surrogates' son is killed by a weapon that not only destroys surrogates but liquefies the operators' brains, not unlike the effect one gets from watching America's Nest Top Model.

Greer must find who's behind the murder.

The plot flows logically and entertainingly. Nothing extraordinary. I prefer solid conventionality to faux profundity and attempts to "blow my mind."

This dystopian future is rather bright. People who like their dystopia especially dark, with wild gangs assaulting innocents- Bladerunner and Clockwork Orange come to mind- or nightmarish 1984-like regimes torturing citizens with huge rats or Joe Biden speeches, will probably not like Surrogates. Those with a low tolerance for human degeneration, like me, will be disturbed enough.

The strength of the situation made me forget or even appreciate the subdued special effects. We get some green goo from the detached robots' arms. A head peels off. Hot chicks jump off buses.

I don't know if it's because real people don't really have to sit in them, but the automotive model line for 2017 looks exactly like the cars you can get at your local Toyota dealer after you finish reading this post. That, or the Touchstone set crew loved their Prius' so much that they dared not tinker with them (the budget was only 80 million- good job!)

I would have loved to have been the casting director for this movie. The actresses are quite, stunningly, beautiful. I guess there's something for the ladies as well. As you'd imagine, the ratio of beautiful to ugly surrogates is very high, with only the student body of the UCLA psychology department even coming close.

My wife would look the same.

Real-life UCLA Psychology major

I like that Greer's surrogate looks like him (for the record, mine would look like me minus 10 pounds- I'd be the ugliest surrogate, but who cares- it's all fake and I'd feel unique).

I also like the idea of Army surrogates. I wouldn't have to stay in shape or camp in the rain.

Like half of all Hollywood movies, Surrogates is based on a comic book.

Politics/Message:

The movie deals with human dignity issues familiar to humans living in modern societies: the preference for simulated human interaction over the admittedly sometimes unpleasant (and odorous) kind; its attendant problems like pornography and drug abuse; and bio-ethical matters like abortion, creative reproduction, and stem-cell research.

These are primarily religious problems. Prophet mentions God once. I can see people who don't want pesticides in their carrots and existentialists (below) protesting the state of 2017 affairs, but the strongest opposition voices in such a world would likely come from traditional faith communities, Christianity in the Western world, Islam and Hinduism in the East.

One of the selling points for a surrogate world is that it would allow individuals to traipse through life danger-free. Being safe and comfortable numb is the goal of one of the two great secular world views, the one that pushes for high safety nets and rubber playgrounds.

Existentialists, those who gain meaning from doing a bunch of stuff ("bucket list") or from "extreme" experiences would be split. Some might say that if living through a robot is fulfilling, people should do it and that any opposition would be itself artificial, only coming from antiquated moral structures; while some might decry the lack of danger and real-ness.

The movie supports the traditional view of marriage, a real bond between a husband and wife that demands some kind of loyalty.

It's interesting that we can already, almost do this kind of stuff through games like Second Life.