Surrogates

Review: Surrogates

USA, 2009, cert. PG13. Dir. Jonathan Mostow, 104 mins. Cast: Bruce Willis, Rosamund Pike, James Cromwell

What if you could live a rich and fulfilling life from the comfort of an armchair? If you could escape the limitations of your feeble, pasty body, would you? What exactly does it mean to be human? Surrogates asks some interesting questions.

Surrogates also fails to answer any of them.

In the not too distant future, people, including Bruce Willis’ dour-faced detective, live their whole lives through robotic avatars. These robots can be tailored, like mail-order sex dolls, to look any way the operator chooses. The user zones out in a ‘stim chair’ and enjoys life without the bodily inconveniences of creaking joints, foul odours or chronic ugliness. When a user somehow dies as a result of using his ‘surrogate’, frowny old Willis is called in to investigate.

In the rare moments when he’s not plugged into his surrogate, the real Willis is a bald schlub who shuffles around his apartment in a soiled dressing gown. Surrogate Willis is an airbrushed robotic gigolo with an inexplicable smear of yellow doll hair. But neither has the charisma or sex appeal of a young Bruce Willis. Willis turns in another lazy rehash of the unhappy policeman routine that has become his wearisome trademark. Rosamund Pike isn’t bad as his surrogate-addicted wife, a paranoid shutin who never leaves her room, but their relationship is paper-thin and about as convincing as that hair. That horrible, horrible hair.

Surrogates is riddled with plot holes. Surrogates are seen working office jobs in which they operate computers remotely. Why would anyone send a robot to the office to do a job that they themselves could do from home? Then there’s a bunch of separatists who think that surrogates are the work of the devil and live in a technology-free ghetto in the middle of town (think Ommish). It looks like a set from one of the cheaper Mad Max movies. Why? I don’t bloody know. The less said about the villain, who does bad things for no reason whatsoever, the better. The action sequences are lame and cheap; surrogates fighting a war in some nonspecific sandy country look like crash test dummies mincing around a Doctor Who quarry.

There are plenty of movies that ask similar questions in much more succinct and interesting ways. Hell, Robocop is a more nuanced ghost-in-the-machine story. In fact somewhere, in some dimly lit bedroom, Blade Runner is probably slumped in a stim chair, covered in cookie crumbs, afraid to leave the house. The pitiful robot impostor that’s currently lurching around our cinemas is called Surrogates.

4/10

-James