Click to play videoCast: Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike, Boris Kodjoe, James Francis Ginty, James Cromwell, Ving Rhames.
Director: Jonathan Mostow.
Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, might be best described as an engaging sci-fi thriller set in a near future where humans stay at home and program robots to represent them in the world.
Sounds like a swell idea, if you ask me -- you get to stay at home and relax and not move an inch, while your surrogate goes out and does your job, even as you control his every action with your mind. What's more you can get a surrogate that's thinner, or younger looking, or less bald than yourself. What's not to like?
Well, Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell play two youthful but suspiciously plastic-looking FBI surrogates investigating the murder of a young couple (surrogates both), outside a club one night.
The Feds discover that not only the robots have been killed but also their operators, which is a scientific impossibility. What's more shocking is that one of the victims is the son of the man who invented the surrogate technology.
The investigation leads Willis' character to the world of Dreads, real human beings who reject surrogates and live in communities with other living, breathing humans and whose leader, The Prophet (played by Ving Rhames) vociferously condemns these robotic avatars.
Predictably, the film plays up the moral debate about the dehumanising effects of machines, but good thing is there are a bunch of smart twists along the way that are fun to try to solve. This might have been a better film had it avoided settling into formula by throwing in your usual action scenes and explosions, which eventually turn this into your typical Hollywood B-movie.
I'm going with two-and-a-half out of five for Surrogates; it's a high-concept, low-brow entertainer that will satisfy the teenager in you.
Rating: 2.5 / 5
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