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Friday, September 25, 2009
‘Surrogates’ too robotic for its own good
Surrogates very effectively shows what it’s like to be a fake human being. That’s why it doesn’t quite work.
Although it sports clever action scenes, good performances and an intriguing premise, Surrogates fails to connect because it’s too mechanical for its own good. Bereft of emotion, the movie left me cold. Fascinated as I was by some of the ideas, ultimately I didn’t really care about the characters.
That’s a shame because Surrogates, based on a graphic novel by Robert Vendetti and Brett Weldele, had a lot of potential. At first, it struck me as kind of a low-rent Minority Report, depicting a near future that uses innovative but unethical technology. In this movie’s case, that technology is robots, or as the title would have it, surrogates. Originally, the surrogates were created to help the disabled and the military.
As humanity so often does, however, it lets the technology get out of hand. Surrogates become so popular, almost everyone uses at least one. From a remote location, humans can make the surrogates do risky adventurous things they wouldn’t attempt themselves.
This becomes especially dangerous when a terrorist finds a way to kill the surrogates. Not only does a specialized weapon disable the robot, it also taps into the robots’ feed to the human. So when the surrogate dies, the human dies with it. Investigating the crime is Greer (Bruce Willis), a police detective who is himself so attached to his surrogate, he hasn’t left his house in years.
Besides this fascinating plotline, Surrogates has a number of strong points. The cast is uniformly strong. Willis plays a burnt-out shell of a man very well, Radha Mitchell proves her action prowess as Willis’ partner, who is also a surrogate, Rosamund Pike is affecting as Greer’s wife, who is even more lost to surrogates, and James Cromwell is as compelling as ever playing the surrogates’ reluctant creator.
Director Jonathan Mostow’s other credits include Breakdown, U-571 and Terminator 3. As he did in those films, Mostow shows strong action chops in this movie. A chase with Willis and Mitchell is not only exciting but rather funny, as Willis blithely mows down one surrogate after another.
For all his technical skill, however, Mostow isn’t nearly as good at telling a human story, and that’s where Surrogates finally breaks down. The screenplay by John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, who also wrote Terminator 3, never hides its twists well, and it’s so caught up in technology itself, I found it hard to care about anyone.
It’s doubly ironic, then, that the movie comes out the same week The Wizard of Oz celebrated its 70th anniversary. This movie has a brain and even a little courage, but somewhere along the way, someone forgot to give it a heart.
GRADE: C+
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