Akela Reviews “Surrogates”

By Akela Talamasca on September 28th, 2009

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With very few exceptions, Hollywood science fiction movies are actually two movies to me: the movie they made, and the movie I made in my head while I was watching the movie they made. “Surrogates” is definitely the latter. It executes passingly well on its premise, but filled me with so many unanswered questions that I left the theater desperately wanting a shot at writing a sequel.

Long story short: “Surrogates” postulates a future where humanity has invented technology that allows people to remotely inhabit android replicas of themselves. Consequently, life is lived almost entirely by proxy, which is one of the main themes of the film. There are shades of “The Matrix” and “Blade Runner” and “Dark City” in this, but “Surrogates” is definitely its own film. I won’t be revealing anything of the plot, so consider this a spoiler-free review.

As you might expect from a movie whose premise deals in artificial reality, there are a lot of very unreal-looking scenes, both intentional and accidental. I noticed a great deal of CGI — often somewhat conspicuously placed. There’s always a slight haze around the computer-generated elements in this movie, and I’d guess off-hand that maybe 80% of the scenes in the movie have been digitally treated in one way or another. This effect is a double-edged sword — it does help create the eerie sensation of living in a world where most of the people you see aren’t really people at all, but almost-convincing robot bodies; at the same time, constantly being reminded that you’re looking at digital special effects creates a distancing effect from the immersion of the movie.

Another way that the unreality washes over you is in the delivery of the dialogue. There are some fairly goofy lines to either chuckle or wince at, but as a whole it isn’t the actual wordsmithing that’s to blame for the sometimes too-mannered conversations. If the idea is to promote the human beings-as-automatons motif, then it’s excusable, but then the problem becomes that not all surrogates talk the same way. Sometimes they speak in classic 50’s robot fashion, other times they’re more animated and personable, and it’s impossible to tell what makes the difference. If I wanted to be charitable, I’d guess that not all surrogate bodies are at the same level of sophistication, so there are different feels for different models. There is some proof of this in the movie, but not enough to really allow me to make that conceptual leap.

And in a nutshell, that’s kind of what bothered me about “Surrogates”. It gave me just enough information about its world and inhabitants to make me ask a metric ton of questions, yet doesn’t provide enough substance for me to be okay with not knowing the answers. If you tell me to invent a world where you can have a body that can look like anything, then I’m going to populate it with the widest variety of off-beat, crazy-looking people I can imagine. The movie gives one noticeable example of the possibilities, but that’s it.

Like so many Hollywood science fiction movies, this one frustrated me again and again by tiptoeing up to a great idea, then shying away. We’re shown a bus stop advertisement for “Football Monday” featuring a silhouette of a player holding a severed head, obviously implying the kind of violent action that surrogates can accomplish, but we never get to see it in action. A few times we see surrogates get really beat up, with no apparent pain, yet we’re also shown the surrogates feeling pleasure. I don’t believe that it would be possible to invest an artificial body with the capacity for feeling either one or the other, yet not both — either they’re completely unfeeling, responding just to pressure, or they have the full range of sensations.

There are just so many inconsistencies on offer. The opening credits display over a history of the surrogate phenomenon, at one point mentioning that crime had become nearly extinct since their advent, yet there is still a police force, and in fact there is a model of surrogate whose main function is to watch over a large bank of monitors for crimes as they occur. If humans are given the ability to pursue actions without consequences, such as surrogacy allows, you won’t end up with a crime-free society; just the opposite, in fact. Not to mention the larger problem of human survival: I have to assume that surrogates can’t conceive children. So if we believe that surrogate use is so popular that the majority of the population uses them for everything, sex included, then the human race is doomed to extinction.

Where are the back-alley, black market surrogates? What about surrogates who look just like celebrities? What’s happening to the plant life of the world, now that the carbon dioxide-breathers are all indoors all the time? What does the underground sex industry look like? How have sports changed? Is it really believable that a tool with this kind of potential for mischief would be freely available to just anyone who could afford it? The world of “Surrogates” has to be much stranger and much more expansive than the movie lets us see, yet we’re confined to what practically amounts to just a few city blocks. If you want a good example of the kind of thing my version of “Surrogates” would resemble, go take a dive into the virtual space Second Life.

Despite what I said about Bruce Willis in the Weekend Movie Alert, he did a smash-up job in this role. He lets some genuine emotion leak through his craggy mask, and his weathered and beat-up face proves to be the best frame for his haunted eyes as he deals with the notion of what it means to be human in a society of, essentially, superhumans. Radha Mitchell hands in a confusing mix of acting ability; I was never quite sure how much of her precise mannequin act was meant to be her actual personality, and how much of it was designed to remind the audience that we were looking at a surrogate. The same goes for most of the cast, really, except for James Cromwell, who I normally love, but who felt underutilized, and capable of giving so much more.

In all, I actually enjoyed “Surrogates”, but that might only have been for the ideas that it scattered casually by the wayside, rather than for its own sake.