Back in ancient times, say, 1990 AD (AOL Dominates), one of the dire predictions about the Internet was it would mean THE END OF HUMAN INTERACTION AS WE KNEW IT. Rather than socialize with people face-to-face we would only know them through a TV set-sized monitor you’d stare into all day. You’d never leave the house, spending all day sitting around in your pajamas, staring into that evil screen…As it turned out, we don’t spend all day staring into a computer screen, just most of it. We still have flesh and blood friends and interactions but we also all know at lease one person very well (sometimes intimately) and we’ve never been in the same room with that person, unless it was a chat room. (Does anybody still do chat rooms?)The world of Surrogates harkens back to those early fears and combines it with the ultimate in virtual reality: actual reality, once removed. In a recognizable near future almost everyone on the planet has a “surrie,” an android doppelgänger sent out into the “real world” in their stead. (Question: How “real” is a world where everyone in it is a machine? Anyway…) Through your surrogate, you can experience virtually anything without the negative consequences—no pain, fatigue or health risks. You can even be someone else (another sex, age or race).There are some who reject surrogate life, preferring to live in their own bodies: they are generally referred to as “meatbags,” living in “people only” ghettoes sort of like Amish homeless. Many of them believe in the anti surrogate philosophy of a self-appointed prophet called… The Prophet. And when someone appears with a weapon capable of destroying surrogate bodies and their controllers, it falls to a dedicated FBI agent to get to the bottom of things.
There are a lot of things to like about Surrogates, but… It’s a rather intelligent script, but not Nolan Brothers-smart. It’s more of a fable than fully-realized SF (the story neatly avoids such considerations as how everybody who wants one can afford a surrogate body or how such a complex machine operates without technical glitches—think it’s hard trying to find a signal for your cell phone? Try operating your surrogate body in a dead zone.) The action sequences and CGI are impressive and unobtrusive and when they occur, they actually add to the story—but they’re nothing you haven’t seen before. There are philosophical and emotional issues raised and explored but nothing on the Dark Knight/Iron Man (or even Hulk) level.There is a neat, subtle thing they do with plain ol’ makeup that you discover in the course of the movie: the surrogates are all drop-dead-movie star-supermodel gorgeous, the meatbags all look like they could be candidates for either The Biggest Loser or Extreme Makeover, but toward the end of the movie, we see the surrogates as too perfect, having more in common with those Old Navy spokesmannequins than real people.Ultimately, the movie itself seems kind of like a surrogate for an SF movie: an enjoyable experience but not quite “the real thing.”
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