This week found me checking out the new Bruce Willis movie Surrogates. The movie starts with a rather compelling concept of humans living life through the use of hyper-realistic robots. Of course in this world no one’s surrogate is overweight, old or even has a wrinkle. The surrogates all have great hair, perfect skin, perfect bodies, etc. The only signs of anything artificial are the flat looks they all tend to have and, distractingly at times, a stiff walk.
The first 15 minutes of the movie had me won over. They sold me entirely on the creativity and concept. I was ready to be taken on a nice journey. Instead I just got taken for a ride.
The film isn’t bad. It just has as much heart as the surrogates do—which is to say, none at all. It’s a flat-line. There’s lots of incredulous special effects that do nothing to move the movie forward and the story itself is, at the same time, both convoluted and predictable.
It all felt like a cheaper version of the Will Smith version of I, Robot. That wasn’t a great movie and it annoyed the hell out of Isaac Asimov fans but it was a heck of a lot more enjoyable than this film. It even boasts James Cromwell who was the inventor of the surrogates in this film and the robots in I, Robot. Still didn’t help and he’s less impressive here. There’s also a frustrating character playing the estranged wife (Rosamund Pike) that, like everything else, comes off dull.
Much could have been done with the entire curiousness of the whole surrogate thing but instead we just get a bland homicide movie. Doh.
