Although it felt immensely parallel to Mark Neveldine's Gamer, Surrogates explores the scarier side of avatar life when people opt for living through robots instead of their own bodies. With the charisma and macho swagger that Bruce Willis brings to the screen and the talents of Ving Rhames, James Cromwell and Boris Kodjoe, what really ended up disappointing me was the unimpressive graphics of the Surrogates themselves. Someone should have asked Milla Jovovich who did her makeup in Resident Evil Extinction because she looked more the part of a porcelain robot than the effect they tried on this movie, it was distracting and strange.
Plot: When a couple of Surrogate (robots created to replicate human beings) users are killed through their hosts, detectives Greer (Bruce Willis) and Peters (Radha Mitchell) set out to find the source behind the killings. What they find is that a new weapon has been introduced that kills the host and user behind the avatar. A threat that could potentially disrupt the 99% drop in world-wide fatalities that the surrogates originally brought. Greer has grown to dislike the daily routine of living through a Surrogate and before long ditches his avatar in lieu of walking around the city as a human (something that is unheard of). With his own eyes and wits about him, Greer is able to uncover the source of the weapon and the people behind it. With his only grip on human life being his Surrogate addicted wife, he must find a way to stop the weapon which could mean danger for her and everyone in the world that is plugged in.
While I can appreciate the sci-fi element to Surrogates, it offers nothing new in terms of plot, storyline and conclusion. It is the fear of a virtual world in the future exaggerated with the visuals of nasty, sweaty, pock ridden humans stuck to their bed-like structures. A world of pasty people plugged into a machine that gives them the control of a beautiful and flawless version of themselves. You have the stereotypical fat nerd in the guise of a hot, blond sexpot, the sex heavy Club scenes and the city filled with people who aren't really people. Think Blade Runner, Matrix and I-Robot and you know the particular shot of what I speak. Yet Greer's city did not feel like a city at all, it felt like a large set with fancy CGI painted all over it to make it look "futuristic". I couldn't shake the world in a glass bowl feeling as the streets seem to lead to nowhere and the shots of the external camps looked even worse. The warm and fuzzy feelings of the future that I received when I watched older movies like Minority Report, I-Robot and the 5th Element is missing in this one. There just wasn't enough authenticity in Greer's surroundings and it made it seem so staged.
This story seemed to be better suited for a comic book or graphic novel. The big screen does not seem like the right medium for Surrogates because the humanoid CGI look is a long way from being mastered. Still, if you can stomach the visuals to follow Greer in his quest for an answer, you may find a bland and unoriginal police story that ends up being solved a bit too easily. I would suggest that you wait this one out for an evening rental with the family since the violence is minimal (the Surrogates bleed green), there are no real sexual situations and the length is relatively short. I cannot recommend the box office version of this movie.
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