Review: Surrogates

Grade: C

Surrogates is a sci-fi movie about a future where the technology has been created so people can live their lives through surrogate technology. A company has developed robotics that can be controlled by people's thoughts. This technology evolves so far that they create robots that look just like their human counterparts and 90%+ of the population currently lives their day to day life through their surrogate. This has created crime and disease to drop to virtually nothing. There are factions of humans, however, that believe that living through surrogates is wrong. A detective, Tom Greer, is called to a crime scene where 2 surrogates have been destroyed. When they go to talk to the users they discover they had been killed using their surrogates. Now the heat is on as Tom and his partner try to find out how someone managed to kill a person through their surrogate and stop them.

This movie showed so much potential, pretty much none of which was realized. The concept was amazing, and while there were one or two brief scenes showing how people use their surrogates to live as hard as possible, they didn't do enough with this. Their could have been some amazing action sequences involving surrogates but that didn't really happen. The story and plot start out well enough before just getting weird and kind of confusing at times.

There were good parts of it too. The concept alone did keep me interested throughout the movie. I did like how they would show a couple of the users unplug from their surrogates and show that in real life, they look a lot dumpier (sometimes like meth addicts) and in some cases, completely different than their surrogate. It shows how, given the opportunity, many people live through a surrogate that looks like their idea of perfection. It also did a good job showing the shock it would cause if someone had to disconnect and live their life for a while in the real world.

Bruce Willis (Die Hard, The Fifth Element) plays the lead role, Tom Greer. During his investigation he encounters someone with a powerful weapon and his surrogate is fried and he is forced to live without it. Willis does a great job showing the shock that something like this would cause. Willis really did a great job with this movie. Radha Mitchell (Phone Booth, Pitch Black) plays Greer's partner Agent Peters. She did a pretty good job as well with her role. Rosamund Pike (Doom, Pride and Prejudice) plays Maggie, Tom Greer's wife. She did a good job with this role as Maggie has become obsessed with living through her surrogate and it seems like it has been a while since Tom has seen her real self. The movie also features James Cromwell (I Robot, W.), as the inventor of surrogate technology, and Ving Rhames (Mission Impossible trilogy) as the leader of the human movement, his character is known as "the Prophet".

This movie was good but not great. If you are a fan of sci-fi it is definitely worth checking out. Otherwise, it is kind of a disappointment and not worth rushing out theaters to see.