What if you could live a full life from the comfort of your living room or bedroom – a life where you could try anything, secure in the knowledge that you’d be completely safe from harm? Surrogates is The Matrix meets Die Hard. It is the future (though judging by the cars it is not too distant a future) and a company called VSI has developed a technology where a robot, looking like you on your best day, and directed by your thoughts, goes forth into the world to live your life for you. In your “stem chair” as “operator”, you experience everything the surrogate is experiencing. The possibilities titillate. It is, as VSI advertises, “Life – only better.”
In this futuristic world seemingly everybody has a surrogate through which they are vicariously living. And since VSI provides a multitude of tailoring options, everybody’s surrogate is beautiful. The end result is a world of beautiful people running around, living their lives and having exciting adventures, every one of which is being experienced by somebody sitting alone in their apartment or house somewhere, hooked up to the surrogate grid.
Bruce Willis plays FBI agent Tom Greer, investigating a rash of surrogate murders (if murder is a word one can use to describe the destruction of a machine). There’s hardly a need for the FBI, or any law enforcement for that matter, since crime has decreased 99% since everybody started using surrogates. But the recent surrogate murders come with a twist – somehow (although VSI denies the possibility) these murders have also caused the actual deaths of the respective operators. Soon we learn that not everybody lives through a surrogate. There is a growing faction of people who see surrogates as evil. “We’re not meant to experience the world through a machine,” propounds the leader of the faction, a mysterious man known simply as “The Prophet” (played by Ving Rhames). He preaches revolution against the surrogate lifestyle and this gives us a suspect in the murders.
Greer’s surrogate is destroyed in the process of following up on the crimes and he is faced with having to venture out into the world as his real self – something he has not done for presumably years, and there is an interesting scene of Greer walking down a normal sidewalk full of people (all surrogates, of course) feeling the kind of anxiety you would only ascribe to a man suffering from acute agoraphobia.
We learn along the way that Greer lost a son years ago to a car accident. He and his wife Maggie (Rosamund Pike) have been living vicariously through surrogates ever since, and it is the only way they have been able to cope. Now, with Greer living life as himself in the real world, we begin to catch the drift that maybe living life as a real person, outside of the comfort and security of one’s home, is actually a pretty good way to go about things. As science fiction goes it’s not exactly a ground-breaking concept, but it still makes for a good plot and, in my case, a decent after-movie philosophical conversation with the company in which I watched it.
Jonathan Mostow (T3 – Rise of the Machines) directed the film, based on Robert Venditti’s novel, and does so smartly and skillfully. The movie zips right along. James Cromwell, excellent as always, is on hand as the inventor of surrogate technology, and the fetching Radha Mitchell plays Greer’s FBI partner. I’ve never been a huge sci-fi fan and coming less than a week after watching District 9 I now feel the need for a good down-to-earth film noir or something, but Surrogates is a damn fine evening’s entertainment, often more action flick than sci-fi. And it’s out on DVD, which means, of course, that you can experience the whole thing from the comfort and security of your own living room.
8/10