Sur­ro­gates is an ele­gantly lit­eral twist on the clas­sic sci-fi theme of liv­ing through avatars. Cyber­punk writ­ers William Gib­son and Neal Stephen­son pio­neered vir­tual real­ity as a set­ting for the dra­matic exag­ger­a­tion of issues first sparked by the very begin­nings of inter­net chat rooms. Their pre­dic­tions have already come true, in part, in the form of social net­work­ing and immer­sive games like Sec­ond Life and World of War­craft. Sur­ro­gates takes this con­ceit one step fur­ther, but fails to address moss of the ques­tions it raises. To look deeper than I think the film sup­ports, you might start to think about the per­sonas we craft for our­selves in dif­fer­ent con­texts, how we dress and behave in the pri­vacy of our homes ver­sus how we do at work or play.

Directed by Jonathan Mostow (of the excel­lent nail-biter Break­down, but also the dud Ter­mi­na­tor 3: Rise of the Machines), the film is based on the comic book The Sur­ro­gates by Robert Ven­ditti and Brett Weldele. The premise requires a long, involved pro­logue nec­es­sary just to explain it. This very near future is defined by the tech­nol­ogy for remote-controlled androids, which are not unlike cars: afford­able enough for the major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion to own one, avail­able in tiered mod­els that reflect your income and taste, and a way of life ingrained into soci­ety just as much as cars have shaped cities and the high­ways that net­work them together.

Taken to its log­i­cal extreme, a world pop­u­lated by remote con­trolled robots affects every­thing from the work­place to war­fare. Beauty par­lors have mor­phed into some­thing like hi-tech auto repair shops, where peo­ple trick their sur­ro­gates out with new rub­ber faces and super-strong limbs. Patriot Act-like mass sur­veil­lance is con­ducted through the robots’ very eyes, with­out their own­ers’ per­mis­sion, in an impossible-to-miss metaphor for Bush-era war­rant­less wire­taps. War is now a death­less abstract resem­bling a com­puter game: face­less drones teem dis­tant bat­tle­grounds in a sick par­ody of today’s air­borne Preda­tor drones and precision-guided mis­siles. Notice also the spot­less art direc­tion: every­thing is clean because robots don’t eat or litter.

When so much of the fic­tional ram­i­fi­ca­tions are thought out, it’s dis­ap­point­ing when so many other obvi­ous impli­ca­tions are left unclear. We’re told the crime rate has fallen dra­mat­i­cally since most peo­ple started liv­ing through robot sur­ro­gates, but why, nec­es­sar­ily? Per­haps because there’s no such thing as rap­ing or mur­der­ing a robot. But why do FBI agents have such lux­u­ri­ous homes, if their jobs are less nec­es­sary in this utopia?

One inter­est­ing wrin­kle barely touched upon is that some char­ac­ters, includ­ing Greer (Bruce Willis) and his wife Mag­gie (Rosamund Pike), have selected sur­ro­gates mod­eled on their own nat­ural phys­i­cal appear­ances. Younger, stronger, and more vir­ile, per­haps, but rec­og­niz­ably their ide­al­ized like­nesses. There are only a few exam­ples of users that opt to mix race and/or gen­ders, let alone go to fur­ther extremes. The most out­wardly unusual look­ing sur­ro­gates we see merely have impos­si­ble com­plex­ions. Per­haps the Greers are not fully com­mit­ted to liv­ing this way. Why not explore this point more? A fail­ure of the imagination.

But by far the biggest absur­dity is the claim that 98% of the pop­u­la­tion lives through sur­ro­gates. The film would have been bet­ter off by side­step­ping the ques­tion of whether or not much of the pop­u­la­tion could afford state-of-the-art con­sumer elec­tron­ics. If only a por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion in 2010 has access to things like health care and broad­band, it’s cer­tainly absurd to pre­tend for even a silly sci-fi movie that we all might some day be able to afford per­sonal robots. But then again, there are hun­dreds of mil­lions of cars in use world­wide today, so per­haps it is not that out­ra­geous to hypoth­e­size that some­day we all might be remotely pilot­ing some kind of robot around all day every day.

While many other peo­ple, includ­ing his wife, choose to live life through their sur­ro­gates, FBI agents are given tur­bocharged loaner mod­els in some kind of perk akin to today’s com­pany cars. Greer behaves dif­fer­ently as him­self or when work­ing through his sur­ro­gate. He spouts tough, sar­cas­tic, noir-ish detec­tive dia­logue when work­ing, but turns meek and emo­tional when liv­ing as a “meatball.”

Ving Rhames and James Cromwell appear in dis­ap­point­ing fleet­ing roles. Rosamund Pike is obvi­ously very beau­ti­ful, but her wide cir­cu­lar glassy eyes frankly look slightly odd from cer­tain angles, mak­ing her an excel­lent cast­ing choice.

There are fewer android-related spe­cial effects than you might imag­ine, espe­cially when com­pared to West­world (read The Dork Report review), The Step­ford Wives, Alien, and A.I., all of which revel in reveal­ing robotic guts beneath rub­ber skin (images one might even fetishize as a lit­eral “cyber­porn”). Rather, the film’s best spe­cial effect is when a sur­ro­gate deac­ti­vates and comes to a com­plete halt. I can’t guess how it was done, but it’s clearly more com­pli­cated than sim­ply freez­ing the frame. It’s very eerie to see a per­son, how­ever artificial-seeming, sim­ply and silently freeze as the light of life goes out of their eyes.

A osten­ta­tious dan­gling plot thread about Greer’s dead son goes nowhere. Even the rev­e­la­tion of what caused his death is a mis­fire, and has no impact upon the story. Why would a painful loss in the fam­ily com­pel the Greers to live vir­tual lives? Every­one else is only doing it because they want to appear attractive.

The final moments are lame and non-dramatic, rely­ing on unseen news­cast­ers to explic­itly out­line the themes of the movie, for the slower mem­bers of the audi­ence, perhaps.

Offi­cial movie site: www.chooseyoursurrogate.com

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