Lower Decks

Imagine a world where you have no fear of getting hurt or sick, while still being able to fully participate in your daily life?  Where a machine, called a surrogate, can do all of the heavy lifting while you command it from the safety of your home?  This is the world of Surrogates, the new genre film based on a graphic novel by Robert Venditti.  And while I’ll freely admit that the idea is fascinating, does the film itself work?

And I’ll answer immediately – no, it doesn’t.  I’m not going to say that the movie is bad because I don’t think it is.  It has a very interesting premise, but it doesn’t try to be anything that it isn’t.  It is a Bruce Willis action movie that takes the plot of I, Robot, tweaks it, and runs with it.  It even uses James Cromwell as the original inventor of surrogates, further connecting this movie to the Will Smith film from a few years ago.

But I don’t think it tries too hard to make itself about social commentary, and it’s only about 90 minutes long.  If you go in expecting too much, you’ll probably be disappointed.  If you go in expecting a summer movie, I think you’ll enjoy it just fine.

The plot revolves around Tom Greer, an FBI agent who is investigating the murder of a high-profile victim while using a surrogate.  Since the destruction of a surrogate isn’t supposed to lead to the death of a human operator, it’s a big deal to the FBI.  Like one of the characters says early in the film, it would defeat the purpose of surrogacy.

Greer gets pulled into the clash between a world run almost-exclusively by surrogates and a small faction of humans that are determined to rid the world of the robot “abominations.”  This faction has a self-governing, but highly impoverished, community outside the city that doesn’t allow any robots inside.  But when the humans are suspected to be involved in the murder, Greer realizes that the skirmish is a lot deeper than he originally imagined.

There are a couple of plot twists in the movie, but none are really that surprising.  If you don’t sit back and enjoy the ride, you’ll probably figure it out and be a bit disappointed.  The ending of the movie, which differs from the ending of the graphic novel, is also probably a bit too clean for this kind of movie.  But all in all, I think it is what it tries to be.

However, after thinking it over, I think this was the kind of idea that probably should’ve been a television series instead of a movie.  Because this is a world that is really fascinating to me, and a 90-minute action film isn’t going to satisfy the curiosity that I have about it.  We see glimpses of the different ways that surrogates are used, but they’re just glimpses.  And, to me, it wasn’t enough.

Because ever since I saw the first trailer for the movie, I’ve been thinking about how this would all play out in real life.  If such technology existed, would the movie be correct in assuming that the great majority of people would use it?  Would I use it?

And it’s an interesting question.  But when I read that the original idea came from the true cases of people “losing themselves” in their internet personas, I have to think that the world of Surrogatesis what we would get.  To me, it’s a bit of a frightening idea because, in a lot of ways, we’d be creating our own version of the Matrix.  One movie views the idea as a utopia, and the other views a similar idea as a dystopia.

Yes, there are differences between the two, but it’s funny when you start to think about the similarities.

So I would’ve loved if this idea had been done as a TV show, really allowing us to get in the heads of these people.  Let us see the people who happily live through surrogates and the people who do it just to fit in.  I’d also love to see the lives of people living in the “humans only” reservation, and how they live.

Because when I see a movie like this (or, say, Children of Men), I find myself much more interested in the world than in the plot.  And this movie is really no exception.