Surrogates

Heavy handed, but surprisingly effective.

On the effects of a remote life, thanks to the interwebs and Uber.

And a surprisingly contemporary ending, with people in their dressing gowns coming out in the streets -- is this what the end of the Covid confinement will look like?

Ps-yes, Bruce Willis is scary with that wig. Get over it. In 10 years we won't even have actors.

It's a great concept. In the future, the Sims style online gaming, where people live vicariously through characters, has evolved to living out real-life, in the real world, via surrogate robots. Everybody stays home all the time, 24/7. They work, play and travel via their surrogates, from the comfort of their home.

I'm not spoiling anything here -- this all happens in the first 5 minutes. The result of this new era of existence is the dramatic drop in violent crimes, sexually transmitted diseases, death by accident, etc.

Well, it's a great concept. And the CGI is good. Because of the plot, every character is insanely pretty, so the screen is filled with beautiful people.

But... it just... doesn't... quite... gel. The whole thing feels like a cool episode of Star Trek, or something on TV. The story is not riveting. I didn't really care about the characters. The timing was off; things either came too late (I was bored, expecting them) or so fast I couldn't really appreciate.

Surrogates lacks that wow-factor.

Example of bad timing: At the start, one wonders, "What do the users really look like? Anything like like their surrogate robots?" I would expect that, at first, we see Bruce Willis, just some facial hair which his robot doesn't have. Then, eventually, we see that he is older than his robot, so he's "cheating" on age too. Even later still, maybe we'd see an obese person at home posing as an athlete via a surrogate which looks nothing like him. Well, "Surrogates" skips all that build up and goes straight for the punchline: within 10 minutes we see a hot chick robot making with a young man; turns out the hot chick is actually slovenly a middle-aged man. Any twists to come later, in this variety, loses all punch.

Worth a rental.

I first viewed Surrogates upon its home format release and positively found it very ordinary. Viewing it again, with focus and in solitude, it proved to be a far better experience.

The action scenes are what you would expect for a multi-plex appeasing popcorner, loud, colourful and owing great debt to modern technology. Yet to dismiss this totally as one of those easy money making blockbuster movies is most unfair.

Surrogates oozes intrigue, even if it doesn't quite deliver on the smartness written on the page. The idea that in the future robotic alter egos can carry out our everyday mundane functions is cracker-jack, and it opens up a whole can of berserker worms.

This is not merely an excuse to have Bruce Willis running around exploding surrogate robots, as much fun as that is of course, there's a deeper emotional core pulsing away as Willis fights the good fight to make sure being human is not cast aside like a thing of the past, that as flawed as we are, hiding away in a surrogate is not the answer.

This axis of the story is beautifully realised by the plot strand involving Willis and Rosamund Pike as his wife, with both actors doing fine work to give it the required emotional heft. It may ultimately lose itself to a standard conspiracy plot, but there's intelligence within to make Surrogates a better film than it first appears. 7/10

Surrogates' great and very interesting concept and the amount of talent on display were its selling points, and Surrogates on the whole delivers, its good parts being pretty great actually. Of course it's less than perfect, but none of the not-so-good things come over disastrously, more unevenly if anything else.

The film is a very good-looking one, the sci-fi/technological look very handsomely rendered and imaginatively surreal. It's also beautifully shot and crisply edited and there are some good special effects on display. That is not to say that all the special effects are great, some of them looking rather cheap and being more at home in a film from the late 80s-early 90s. The music has its bombastic, pulsating moments as well as a hauntingly understated quality. Some of the script is interesting and probes a lot of thought, but other parts are on the weak side, with some very clichéd dialogue and it doesn't develop its characters as well as it could have done. James Cromwell's character especially is very underutilised and shallow.

From a story point of view, most of it works. There are some good ideas and subplots that are in a good amount if not all cases explored intelligently and intriguingly but what was really remarkable was the subplot with Greer and Maggie's failing relationship, which brought an emotional core that really resonated with me. It's not completely successful, some of it does plod, especially the conspiracy elements, and much more could have been done with the ending, which felt underdeveloped and confused. The action's a mixed bag, some are energetic and exciting but others are pedestrian and on the silly side. Surrogates is directed efficiently and the cast do a great job, though James Cromwell has been much better and more engaged in other roles.

Particularly impressive were a charismatically world-weary and no-nonsense Bruce Willis and Rosamund Pike's excellent, sympathetic performance ranks among her better roles. Radha Mitchell is also touching. Overall, has some uneven moments but a most intriguing film that delivers on most levels. 7/10 Bethany Cox

When you have scores of people living their lives through their online personas, each competing with one another to appear more happy, more perfect, then this movie seems rather prophetic.

I see some complaining about the wooden performances throughout the film, ignoring the fact that this is the point. The surrogates emote very little, and are uncanny to us, who rely so much on non-verbal language to understand our interactions. The moments where actual humans are allowed to emote, especially the brief scenes with Rosemund Pike, shine all the more for it.

Is this movie high art in film form? No, but it's entertaining, it's fairly well paced, and its message is cogent. I recommend watching it at least once.