Surrogates
Directed by Jonathan Mostow
One Star
“Surrogates” is such a half-assed effort on so many levels. To grant the project the time and effort of a review is to award it more time and effort than the filmmakers did. I would understate if I accused director Jonathan Mostow of merely recycling old ideas. Nope, he dug this stuff straight out of the dumpster and slapped a new label on it with scotch tape and a glue stick. He didn’t even wash off the grime from that old, brown banana peel.
Comparisons to Ridley Scott’s brilliant “Blade Runner” are imminent, but not particularly necessary. The discussion would be one of imitation, not influence. Mostow isn’t so much following in the footsteps of that film as he is wearing its boots and sleepwalking.
In Scott’s film, the term was replicants – robots that looked and behaved like humans, which were designed and manufactured to serve as slaves. When the replicants began to adopt basic human survival instincts, they were equipped with a modification that set their life spans concretely at four years. When an unusually strong willed replicant got wind of the modification, he hunted down his makers in search of either answers or vengeance.
In ‘Surrogates”, the robots in question still look and behave like humans, but this time they are operated by the thoughts of their vegetable owners, who lie hooked up to gadgets and operate their lives safely but vicariously through their surrogate machines. The creators proudly claim that murder rates have plummeted since the inception of the surrogates, though I would imagine that destruction of property charges went through the roof.
Where the replicants were manmade machines who developed human psychological traits, the surrogates can serve only as receptacles for them. “Blade Runner” is about machines becoming human, and “Surrogates” is about humans becoming machines.
The plot, so far as I could bring myself to care, centers around a cop named Tom Greer (Bruce Willis), one of those speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick sort of fellows who doesn’t seem to care much for his job until one of his fellow officers gets gunned down (imagine his dismay when five of them kick the futuristic bucket). Of course, Greer conducts his job through his surrogate, a blond haired, fair-skinned likeness of him that doesn’t particularly match his persona.
Greer is investigating a string of murders from the barrel of a mysterious space-blaster-looking-thingajob that’s capable of melting both the circuits of the surrogate and the brain of its operator. Also Greer is having marriage problems, and I just spent about as much time on that subplot as the movie did.
The weapon falls into the hands of a cult of anti-surrogate rednecks, more specifically the hands of their leader (Ving Rhames), a prophet who appropriately calls himself The Prophet and sports a human nest of dreadlocks and a pimp shirt. The goal? Wipe out every surrogate and surrogate user on the East Coast. I think.
This whole thing circles back to the man who invented the surrogates, Canter (James Cromwell), whose motives don’t make any sense to anyone anywhere, including himself. His plot has something to do with the little space blaster being amplified to a global level. Apparently a man of such limitless intelligence couldn’t come up with a more economical solution, like the one that eventually takes place.
That might be the film’s most glaring weakness, now that I think about. No one involved in “Surrogates”, from the writers down to the actors, have any clue what motivates these characters. To watch the film is to see people doing stuff and to not see why. I can think of nary a fate so boring. The movie’s eighty-eight minute running time threatens to go on forever.
Mostow takes the necessary ingredients of a sci-fi thriller and plops them on screen, where they sit lifeless and artificial. Technically it is a movie, yes. It is a visceral combination of sight and sound, with heroes and villains and action and special effects contained in a conventional narrative. But on an emotional and ideological level, in the sense that it conveys even the most remote reflection of the human condition, it is not a movie. It is a hollow shell of celluloid, behind which hides its makers. You know, a lot like the surrogates.
Comparisons to Ridley Scott’s brilliant “Blade Runner” are imminent, but not particularly necessary. The discussion would be one of imitation, not influence. Mostow isn’t so much following in the footsteps of that film as he is wearing its boots and sleepwalking.
In Scott’s film, the term was replicants – robots that looked and behaved like humans, which were designed and manufactured to serve as slaves. When the replicants began to adopt basic human survival instincts, they were equipped with a modification that set their life spans concretely at four years. When an unusually strong willed replicant got wind of the modification, he hunted down his makers in search of either answers or vengeance.
In ‘Surrogates”, the robots in question still look and behave like humans, but this time they are operated by the thoughts of their vegetable owners, who lie hooked up to gadgets and operate their lives safely but vicariously through their surrogate machines. The creators proudly claim that murder rates have plummeted since the inception of the surrogates, though I would imagine that destruction of property charges went through the roof.
Where the replicants were manmade machines who developed human psychological traits, the surrogates can serve only as receptacles for them. “Blade Runner” is about machines becoming human, and “Surrogates” is about humans becoming machines.
The plot, so far as I could bring myself to care, centers around a cop named Tom Greer (Bruce Willis), one of those speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick sort of fellows who doesn’t seem to care much for his job until one of his fellow officers gets gunned down (imagine his dismay when five of them kick the futuristic bucket). Of course, Greer conducts his job through his surrogate, a blond haired, fair-skinned likeness of him that doesn’t particularly match his persona.
Greer is investigating a string of murders from the barrel of a mysterious space-blaster-looking-thingajob that’s capable of melting both the circuits of the surrogate and the brain of its operator. Also Greer is having marriage problems, and I just spent about as much time on that subplot as the movie did.
The weapon falls into the hands of a cult of anti-surrogate rednecks, more specifically the hands of their leader (Ving Rhames), a prophet who appropriately calls himself The Prophet and sports a human nest of dreadlocks and a pimp shirt. The goal? Wipe out every surrogate and surrogate user on the East Coast. I think.
This whole thing circles back to the man who invented the surrogates, Canter (James Cromwell), whose motives don’t make any sense to anyone anywhere, including himself. His plot has something to do with the little space blaster being amplified to a global level. Apparently a man of such limitless intelligence couldn’t come up with a more economical solution, like the one that eventually takes place.
That might be the film’s most glaring weakness, now that I think about. No one involved in “Surrogates”, from the writers down to the actors, have any clue what motivates these characters. To watch the film is to see people doing stuff and to not see why. I can think of nary a fate so boring. The movie’s eighty-eight minute running time threatens to go on forever.
Mostow takes the necessary ingredients of a sci-fi thriller and plops them on screen, where they sit lifeless and artificial. Technically it is a movie, yes. It is a visceral combination of sight and sound, with heroes and villains and action and special effects contained in a conventional narrative. But on an emotional and ideological level, in the sense that it conveys even the most remote reflection of the human condition, it is not a movie. It is a hollow shell of celluloid, behind which hides its makers. You know, a lot like the surrogates.
Rollan Schott
September 28, 2009
Originally Featured in the Daily Nebraskan.
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