I was really looking forward to this one. I'm a real Bruce Willis nut so I'll follow him anywhere, even into a hack sci-fi universe where people replace themselves with robot avatars so that they don't have to wash their hair, or in Willis' case, so they can have hair.
Through news clip exposition, the film tells us that something like 98% of all humans on Earth have opted to let a robot stand in for themselves in the daily grind of life. The "meatbags" stay at home in their sweats and bathrobes, controlling their avatars from "stim chairs" while the robots populate the streets, doing the bidding of their incredibly lazy masters. The problem with Surrogates is that from the moment it starts, you're filled with about a hundred questions that the movie never answers. So do Third World countries have robots walking around being poor for their poor hosts? Perhaps the simplest and most important question the movie never answers is: "why is surrogacy good?". The film of course tries to show why it's in fact bad (duh) and Willis' character slowly comes around to the idea himself and embraces his quest to put an end to it. But the movie never really explains why people thought this was a good idea in the first place or why it was allowed to completely reshape civilization.
While everyone stays at home strapped to their chairs, letting their facial hair and body odour run rampant, the world outside is supposedly a crime-free utopia where blandly attractive robots walk around like extras in a Mariah Carey video. Again, I can maybe see the appeal of Surrogacy if you were an overweight social retard, but what if you already looked like a blandly attractive extra in a Mariah Carey video?
Willis plays a cop and the robot cop version of himself. You can tell the difference because human Willis is bald and has grey in his goatee. Robot Willis is wearing a hilarious hairpiece and has his skin smoothed out with CGI. Willis is investigating one of the worlds first murders in some time, a robot who got fried by some mystery device that also ended up killing the host human. The host human happens to be the son of the reclusive inventor of surrogacy, played by James Cromwell. Naturally, this isn't Law & Order: Roboticide, so the murder investigation leads Willis into a conflict with a much bigger scope, implicating the robot manufacturer, a radical anti-surrogate movement, and the military industrial complex. All the while Willis is trying to convince his wife to unplug from her robot and give him some human love.
Willis doesn't have much to work with here, his character is pretty non-existent, I can't even remember his name. They give him the obligatory dead child to try to inject some pathos into the mix, but it doesn't do anything but give Willis a few scenes of moping. The unfortunate side effect of telling a story in a world full of robots that simply go to work for humans who lie around in recliner chairs, is that it's an incredibly dull sci-fi platform. Pretty tough to tell an exciting story with these materials I would think. We're not talking about exoskeleton terminator robots running amok in a bombed out world, it's more like Abercrombie & Fitch models stiffly walking to work.
Anyway, there is a twist that only a moron doesn't see coming and then a bunch of explanation as to the "why" of things, but I actually stopped paying attention and really only perked up to catch the action scenes (which aren't good at all if you're wondering). The reason I checked out on the movie is that my son Harry was lying on the couch between my wife and I, and despite me politely asking him to "keep it down honey, mommy and daddy are trying to watch some Bruce Willis" he started getting really lively and animated. Being new parents, we of course stopped paying attention to the movie playing in the background and started hanging off Harry's every flail and squirm. In fact, I came up with two new nicknames for him "Homo Flailus" and "Squirmus Erectus" which I think are pretty clever. We kept making goo-goo eyes at him and he would smile (which is relatively new) and make funny little noises.
At a certain point, after contorting my face in an effort to milk a reaction from Harry, I realized something. Harry is my surrogate, my avatar for experiencing or re-experiencing the world. Every facet of life will now be filtered through him. Both big things and little things that you take for granted everyday. I've been smiling just fine on my own for 30 years now, but suddenly smiling is this big deal in my house. We try on new kinds of smiles to try to get Harry to smile and then when he does we delight in the fruits of our labour. Through Harry's ears, I become conscious of sounds I would normally have tuned out. Through his little body I become aware of the temperature in the room and decide whether it suits us.
Anyway, Surrogates is pretty shitty.
No comments:
Post a Comment