Mr. Willis has to save the world... from itself! *dun dun DUN*

Last night, after discovering my downloads of ‘Law Abiding Citizen’ and ’2012′ were pretty poor audio and video quality, we decided to watch ‘Surrogates’.  This movie was directed by less-known Jonathan Mostow, his resume includes ‘Terminator 3′, ‘U-571′ as well as doing some producing and writing on various other flicks.  Michael Ferris and John Brancato wrote this movie, which apparently was based off of a 2005-2006 comic book series.  It stared Bruce Willis who gave his typical action hero performance.  I don’t say that in a negative way, because I’ve always enjoyed him as an actor, but maybe you didn’t.

The premise is simple.  In the future, 99% of humanity live vicariously through their surrogates, robots that have been developed over the past 14 years to look just like the real thing.  They started off as ways for paralyzed, paraplegic and other handicapped individuals to escape the prison they lived in.  But like all technologies it morphed into something else.

The parallel I drew from the surrogates followed technologies like Facebook, Twitter and texting.  People have become dependent on them, faced with choosing the technology and good old fashioned real life, we seem to choose the former.  It was a wonderful criticism of the direction our current society is heading in.  The whole idea of people relying utterly on a machine that allowed them to stay inside their homes at all times yet still interact with others is… well, it’s pretty damn believable.

Back to the story.  A wrench is thrown in this fake world when a weapon surfaces that can not only destroy the surrogates, but kill the operators as well.  This has never happened before because VSI (the corporation responsible for surrogacy) has built in so many safeguards that an operator could get his robot-self run over, dismembered and blown to bits, without any adverse effects to the actual human.  Enter Tom Greer (Willis) an FBI agent who you can clearly see has a distaste for the robot world.  He is commissioned with investigating these first deaths of operator/surrogate.

What this movie does best is move the plot along as well as make it believable.  Greer and his wife have a tense relationship because of her addiction to her surrogate (she NEVER comes out of her room), their son died in a car accident and the “dreads” humans who rejected surrogacy are as radical as they should be.  These three elements are very important to the story and I’d like to discuss the story in its entirety.   Especially because it makes every theme work together as flawlessly as Beethovens Symphony No. 5.  I wont do that though, because the many intricacies that made this movie great would take far too long.

Finally I’ll say that this is smart SF.  Not the most eye-popping or thrilling, but it is SF at its finest.