Surrogates

Touchstone Pictures

Rated PG-13

Running time: 89 minutes



Touchstone Pictures Surrogates is about a world where androids are remote-controlled by human operators in all walks of life. The operators live their lives vicariously through their surrogates in both work and through pleasure with the surrogates assuming all the risk and danger, such as in war, while their operators are safe far away at home. When two surrogates are destroyed - killing their operators in the process - a discrete investigation into the deaths by FBI agent Bruce Willis is conducted before more operators get killed.

Surrogates is a combination of I, Robot and Live Free or Die Hard, with the implications that of living with technology - will eventually take over your life. The Amish style territories that are without technology reminds us of how to get back to nature, or at least with just being human. The surrogates look like young supermodels - while their operators are old, and not so pretty people. The surrogates also do not even have to represent who their operators really are - as Bruce makes a comment to a surrogate lawyer that Bruce really does not know what the woman lawyer really looks like, "I hate lawyers," Bruce later says. The best part of the movie was the introduction of the movie where, through the media, the movie explains how the surrogate phenomenon was created. It is one of the best introductions of a scientific concept that I have seen for a science fiction movie. That setup particularly had to be made - as owning a "surrogate" is big business and must cost at least the amount of a car with the whole world having them, as they had "reports" of surrogates from other countries. Aside from these concepts, the thriller aspect of the movie is a rather standard thriller, and is a fairly predictable thriller film as Bruce searches for the bad guys. The physical leaps and bounds made by the surrogates are pretty cool, although I grew up with the idea that these leaps and bounds would be done by superheroes rather than by android surrogates.

Rated PG-13 for violence. Running time: 89 minutes.

Pancho
All people smile in the same language.