Santikos Cine-opsis

As far as faux-topian sci-fi alternate reality crime dramas go, you could do much worse than “Surrogates”, a robot whodunit with a lot of brain and firepower that sometimes jams but still ends up hitting its target.

We learn early on in “Surrogates” that robotic human duplicates were initially created to restore movement to the disabled, but were then coopted by the military as drones, and eventually released to the general public.  15 years later, 98% of humans live their daily lives through robotic surrogacy, where they can apparently feel all sorts of emotions and stimuli, and yet, feel no pain and are in no danger.

That is, until some jerk on a crotch rocket starts EMP-ing people’s surrogates and melting their brains.  So the FBI sends Bruce Willis and his robot partner Radha Mitchell (whose Surrogate apparently had a defective acting chip) to investigate.  Along the way, Brucey has to unplug from his surrogate and see the world as it really is…a fake, superficial shopping mall of lies built to keep the public distracted and quiet (take that, audience!).

He also has to deal with a radical group of non-surrogate users known as “humans” (or meatbags, an apparent derogatory term for those who reject surrogacy), as well as the inventor of Surrogates who was Steve Jobs-ed from his company during a power struggle and whose son was one of the people killed by the aforementioned crotch rocket jerk.  Not only that, but Willis also must battle through corporate legalese and government cover-ups before he ends up randomly googling the truth about the surrogate attacks (one of the lamest reveals I’ve seen in a suspense movie in a while).

All of this is of course very exciting and explosion-y (especially a wild car chase between the all-human Willis and a surrogate who has apparently downloaded some sort of grasshopper mod from the app store).  But my problem with “Surrogates” is that it turns out to be another movie that uses state of the art technology, shown in giant theaters, to warn us about the dangers of embracing state of the art technology. By the way, did you know that “Surrogates” has a web site where you can create your own surrogate and link to the movie for twitter updates?

Now, I’m not saying that it’s hypocritical for a movie based on the dangers of overdependence on technology to advertise using online social networking, but…oh yeah, that is what I’m saying.  But you can fan them on your Facebook page!

21st century hypocrisies aside, I think the movie does a good job of being an entertaining way to say “Hey!  You!  Quit pretending to be a hot blonde in Second Life and go outside and throw a ball around!”  I just think that if you need a movie to tell you that, then you’re probably not going to get the message even if you see it.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go set my fantasy football lineup.