With direction by the maker of Terminator 3 - and its origins in a graphic novel, with Bruce Willis in the lead - Surrogates seems specifically targeted at the teen SF/action audience. And in its undernourished way, this seems exactly where the movie is headed, filling in the space between end-of-the-world and vampire epics, en route to DVD.
Almost, but not quite. Behind the special effects and splatter lurks something unusual - a fable about humanity's increasing loss of affect and emotional coherence beneath the digital onslaught. Anyone who enters chat groups online will know that she may not truly know just who is on the other side - nymphet or paedophile? Whoever.
In Surrogates the process has been taken to an extreme. People no longer react to each other; instead they mentally control the robotic surrogates of the title, which go out into the "real" world to eat, drink, and have sublime erotic experiences on behalf of their owners.
Lying back in seclusion, electrodes stuck to skulls, the supine majority "lives" as dangerously as it wishes: but, precariously, these believers believe their surrogates are essentially immortal, always replaceable. All wishes are fulfilled; the old can pretend to youth.
Such ideas are familiar by now, almost cinematic staples; and even the Library of America has begun to canonize SF writers, along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.
Everyone (Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg) has imbibed Surrogates-style concepts, but here the man-machine dichotomy has become glaring, menacing a degraded and isolated humanity. Willis (as an FBI agent) starts out investigating the destruction of a surrogate - an event which has stark consequences since now the controller is killed as well. And Willis is very good, at his best since The Sixth Sense. He shows bravery and integrity.
Willis's surrogate is younger, less bald, sexier; but when the real Willis emerges blinking into the sunlight (after his electronic alter ego has been destroyed) he is no matinée idol. He is just hairy and bald, and the existential dilemmas posed by the surrogates have stained his marriage: he barely touches his alienated screen wife (Rosamund Pike) and has developed an empathy with his partner ( Radha Mitchell).
But Willis as this anxiety-stricken investigator is the film's real hero. We enter his frightened - but functioning - mind. He sees the consequences of surrogacy as he wanders behind the glitzy scenes people present to each other. He has sympathy with the ruler of a humans-only reservation (see District 9), The Prophet (Ving Rhames); and with James Cromwell - who invented the surrogates to give the disabled a second life, but who has become an antagonist of the system.
The film is brief (88 minutes) and far too much plot material is stuffed into the frame to make for simple coherence. Nonetheless, there is a clever plotline - one which plays mind-games with reality and appearance, and which culminates in a devastating fulfilment of The Prophet's warnings.
One should also note the allusive fabric - invoking a world in which we can well imagine living and half-living. Warfare is conducted by robots in uniform; the youth and celebrity culture of the past decades is full-on and luminous for the surrogates. One reflection might be that the hippies never died off - they just took up with the military and the academy and invented the Internet. From there, the jaunt into machine life is easily accomplished.
Some of the allegorical subtext is transparent; so any recounting of the plot is suggestive. Surrogates is more original than most have discerned, which could be blamed on an over-reliance on received opinion, not least among our own film reviewers. Looked at closely, the film wanders down some serious philosophical slopes.
Ranking the Analysts 2009
Directed by Jonathan Mostow