Movie review for Surrogates
This is a dark futuristic view of how the world could possibly become, where everyone has a surrogate, a robot with all the features of a human, that is controlled remotely by the owner, with the owner having all their senses interact with whatever the machine is encountering. The owner lives in a virtual world, where the surrogate lives his or her life for him or her, the plausible justification for it of course is that the owner is less at risk from disease and infection, and indeed any harm to their real body, they can virtually go to work, and play, with no worries about their real body, all the toll is taken on the surrogate.
From the opening credits we get introduced to the justification for surrogates, with first a machine where a monkey controls an arm containing a nut with just its mind, to people who are paralysed, controlling robots to do their daily tasks, and people in the army using surrogates for war without any fear of their real bodies being in danger.
Soon Congress signs in to law surrogates for the use in every day lives, but as usual there are objectors to this whole idea of surrogates, the main opponent of this is The Prophet played by Ving Rhames (Pulp fiction), who has set up communes where only humans are allowed. We meet our protagonist, a very young looking Bruce Willis (12 Monkeys) as Tom Greer along with his partner Peters played by the lovely Radha Mitchell (Pitch Black), who are investigating the murder of a surrogate, but in this case, the owner of the surrogate died at the same time the surrogate was destroyed. It turns out that the owner of the surrogate is non other than the son of the inventor of surrogates, Canter played by the dependable James Cromwell (L.A. Confidential).
It seems a weapon has been developed that not only can destroy surrogates, but can at the same time end the life of the operator connected to the surrogate. Tom has personally set himself the task of finding out who murdered Canter’s son and getting hold of this deadly weapon, but he has a mountain to climb to get to the bottom of this, with the head of his department Stone played by Boris Kodjoe (Starship Troopers 3 : Marauder), not happy with his tactics, and Tom himself having doubts about the whole idea of surrogates, unlike his wife Maggie played by the gorgeous Rosamund Pike (The Libertine), who prefers this new life than any other, and looking at her surrogate and indeed virtually all of the surrogates, you can see why, as they all look young and flawless, there is a memorable scene where the real Tom comes into his police department and the clerk surrogate looks at him and mutters “you look terrible“.
This of course is a warning about how the current state of the Internet could evolve, from people able to do many things online they previously had to do in person, to being able to do their daily tasks from the comfort of their computer.
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Posted By Blogger to Movie reviews on 11/11/2009 11:04:00 PM
Filed under: movie reviews