the blog of nathan loding

Sur­ro­gates (2009)
Star­ring: Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Ving Rhames
Directed by: Jonathan Mostow
Writ­ten by: Michael Fer­ris and John D Bran­cato, based on the graphic novel by Robert Ven­ditti and Brett Weldele
Rated: PG-13
Rat­ing: 2 (out of five)

A few years ago, Alex Proyas’s I, Robot (2004) came out.  It decon­structed Isaac Asimov’s phe­nom­e­nal “I, Robot” sto­ries and turned into an action vehi­cle for Will Smith.  I enjoyed the  movie but it def­i­nitely wasn’t good sci­ence fic­tion.  It was just good action.  That’s about the best thing I can say for Sur­ro­gates.

I have not read the graphic novel so I can­not make any com­par­isons in that regard.  There are some moments in the movie that are obvi­ously painstak­ingly recre­ated from the frames of the novel.  Those are unfor­tu­nately few and far between.

14  years from now we have the tech­nol­ogy to cre­ate and con­trol “sur­ro­gates.”  These are life­like androids that expe­ri­ence life for us while we remain back at home, lying in a pod that allows our minds to con­trol the sur­ro­gates.  The great part of sur­ro­gates is that you get to feel every­thing they feel and have none of the side effects.  Sex has gone up, but STI’s have gone down.  The aging process is almost non-existent in the real world.  Sur­ro­gates don’t age, just their con­trollers do.  But also vir­tu­ally non-existent in the real world is human con­nec­tion.  There are reser­va­tions of humans — “meat bags” – where no sur­ro­gates are allowed to enter.  These havens of human­ity are run by The Prophet (Rhames) who aims to restore life to it’s nat­ural roots.

We open with a mur­der.  Some­one on a motor­cy­cle fires a pretty pow­er­ful weapon at two sur­ro­gates.  It causes their sur­ro­gates to fry – which isn’t new, as bul­lets through elec­tronic com­po­nents can cause some seri­ous dam­age – but it also causes their con­trollers to fry as well.  The surrogate/controller who is killed is none other than the son of Dr. Can­tor, the man who invented surrogates.

This sparks the first real homi­cide in years (sur­ro­gates kill other sur­ro­gates, peo­ple don’t kill peo­ple any­more).  Lt. Greer (Willis) and his part­ner (Mitchell) are brought on to solve the case.  Much is unique about it:  why did the safety mech­a­nisms fail and cause the con­troller to die when the sur­ro­gate was fried?  What weapon is pow­er­ful enough to do that?  Why would some­one do such a thing?  Is The Prophet involved?  They then get wrapped up in a con­spir­acy that takes us through to the movie’s inevitable ending.

Mostow also directed Ter­mi­na­tor 3.  He hasn’t grown much as a direc­tor since then.  (On a funny note, I see that his next project is a re-tell of the Swiss Fam­ily Robin­son – inter­est­ing change of scenery from sci-fi).  The movie is rather deriv­a­tive as far as it’s pro­duc­tion goes.  The action isn’t bold, the explo­sions are only “big,” the sus­pense is barely there.  This is true of a lot of movies that Hol­ly­wood churns out these days, and I can openly con­fess to lik­ing a lot of them.  I even liked Ter­mi­na­tor 3!  The real issue with this movie isn’t the pro­duc­tion.  It’s the story.

Again, I haven’t read the graphic novel, and don’t intend to at this point, but the story here is what is wrong with this movie.  Re-read the para­graph above explain­ing the future soci­ety pre­sented in this movie.  The one thing this story does is a great job of tan­ta­liz­ing us with these lit­tle, real­is­tic details of how sur­ro­gacy has affected future soci­ety and human­ity as a whole.  It only hints at it though, and only for the first few min­utes as the cred­its roll.  It bla­tantly ignores, and even some­times pur­posely avoids, par­al­lels to our cur­rent society’s addic­tion to gad­getry and the “zon­ing out” it causes.  This movie is com­pletely devoid of any social con­text what­so­ever.  And that is it’s problem.

I’m not look­ing for this to be a social cri­tique of tech­no­log­i­cal advances and their effects on human­ity.  I think it would have been a wrong choice to have done that.  What I’m ask­ing for is a sense of what’s hap­pened and the real­iza­tion that this has a pro­found effect on how the char­ac­ters would have gone about daily life.  Instead we get one sin­gle moment where Greer walks through the streets as a meat bag instead of a sur­ro­gate for the first time.

Look at Dis­trict 9.  It’s not meant to be a social com­men­tary on Apartheid, it’s not meant delve into social injus­tices, but because the story was borne of those con­di­tions, it’s effects are directly pre­sented on-screen.  I again think that it would have been the wrong choice for that film to have been a true social com­men­tary, but at least it wasn’t afraid of the idea it pro­jected.  Another bril­liant exam­ple is Blade Run­ner.  The film doesn’t truly attempt to be a cri­tique, but instead deliv­ers us into a fully real­ized world that serves as it’s own cri­tique, com­pletely apart from what the film­mak­ers were filming.

A brief hint of what this movie could have been was pro­vided by some early teaser posters.  Take a look here and here to see what I mean.

Action.  Check.  Some pretty explo­sions and car crashes.  Check.  A real world to set the story in?  Nope!

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Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwTJ7mCcFoY

Prof. Ishig­uro and his “Gemi­noid” twin: http://www.irc.atr.jp/Geminoid/