Patrick Sun
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Jun 30, 1999
- Messages
- 39,660
Coming from the wishing well of utopian sci-fi concepts, "Surrogates" sets up a world where humans are so afraid to leave their homes and apartments, lest they suffer harm from violence or disease, and rely on their surrogates (basically sophisticated human-controlled puppets/robots/avatars walking around in the real world) to do their jobs and entertain themselves, much like a videogame of virtual reality, only it happens in the real world while people just lie in their reclined chair, jacked in, and living vicariously through their surrogates.
The film's script wants the audience to accept far too many implausible developments to make such a premise involving and believable. The world filled with surrogates is compromised when a weapon turns up and is able to kill the person controlling their surrogate by firing it at the surrogate, something thought impossible due to supposed fail-safes in place. This threatens to undermine the entire concept of safe surrogacy. Bruce Willis's character Tom Greer is a FBI agent assigned to a case of surrogate murder, along side his partner (Rahda Mitchell), and they follow the clues to uncover possible suspects in a murder-mystery within this framework.
I guess I just wasn't able to get past the concept as presented in the first roll of the film, so the rest of the film just felt hollow, even as it strained to say something profound about the human condition through our connections to one another in the flesh, communicating with people by looking them in the eye and taking in non-verbal cues, and not layer up our defenses with robotic stand-ins.
I give it 2 stars, or a grade of C.
The film's script wants the audience to accept far too many implausible developments to make such a premise involving and believable. The world filled with surrogates is compromised when a weapon turns up and is able to kill the person controlling their surrogate by firing it at the surrogate, something thought impossible due to supposed fail-safes in place. This threatens to undermine the entire concept of safe surrogacy. Bruce Willis's character Tom Greer is a FBI agent assigned to a case of surrogate murder, along side his partner (Rahda Mitchell), and they follow the clues to uncover possible suspects in a murder-mystery within this framework.
I guess I just wasn't able to get past the concept as presented in the first roll of the film, so the rest of the film just felt hollow, even as it strained to say something profound about the human condition through our connections to one another in the flesh, communicating with people by looking them in the eye and taking in non-verbal cues, and not layer up our defenses with robotic stand-ins.
I give it 2 stars, or a grade of C.