Surrogates (epic spoilers ahead)

So Surrogates is one of the most self involved and conservative films I've ever seen.

This will contain pretty severe spoilers by the way.

First of all watch this. It's the Surrogates trailer and it tells you pretty much everything that happens in the film.

Okay, so as far as Surrogates the film goes, it's actually reasonable. The design of the world is very good - the Surrogates themselves look quite realistic - real yet unreal. As close an approximation of human life as we're likely to get. The action scenes are also very good - as you'd expect from Jonathan Mostow.

Anyway, in the end none of the good points of this film matter because the plot is shit. Utter shit. Every time the film does something new or original, the 100% By The Numbers plot drags it down again.

So Bruce Willis is an FBI agent with a standard dose of Convenient Hollywood Angst. A dead kid in this case. He finds out that someone is able to kill people hooked up to the robotic avatars known as Surrogates.

To cut a long story short - the creator of the Surrogates technology was forced out of his own company by the board of directors for remarkably vague reasons. He gets pissed off and decides to create an anti surrogate movement by using a surrogate who looks remarkably like Ving Rhames as a Human Messiah. The company get pissed off at him for this and, rather than (for example) finding HIM and killing HIM, they invent a weapon that can kill the humans connected to their surrogates and accidentally kill this guys son.

This would all be convoluted if the plot moved at any decent pace but these revelations take so damn long that it all makes a certain amount of (completely nonsensical) sense.

So the creator of surrogates gets really pissed off, finds the guy who killed his son, nicks the weapon (how he does this is never really explained) and plugs it in to a magical hub that every surrogate on the planet is plugged into. Bruce Willis gets wind of this, tracks down the creator and asks him why the hell he's preparing to kill billions of people because he has become a little bit angry with some technology that he created.

James Cromwell plays the creator and, bless him, he tries to come across as completely insane, saying "they were dead the moment they plugged into those surrogates" but his heart clearly isn't in it.

Oh, I should also point out that Bruce Willis has a wife who doesn't love him any more. He blames this on the Surrogate she uses. Hm. Deflecting a little, there Brucey?

Anyway, Bruce manages to save the lives of all the users connected to the Surrogates but choses to let the Surrogates themselves die. He agonises about this for a while before making this decision before chosing to set humanity free from this curse, as he sees it.



Now.

Now then.

This is American logic at its best.

The thought process behind it appears to be:

"I have decided that the life that these people are leading is wrong. They are not going to change. I will force them to change and their lives will be better. I will make sure that there is no possibility of reversing this decision in the incredibly unlikely event that it turns out a 55 year old depressed FBI agent doesn't magically know what people want or what's best for society as a whole."

Put simply, it's the typically American desire to save the world, whether it needs saving or not.

Let us not forget that this world was a world without murder or crime of most sorts. And the best thing about it was - no-one was forced to take part. If people wanted to not use a Surrogate, they could just not use a Surrogate.

Everything started going wrong when James Cromwell decided to save the world from the deamon he created and got worse when Bruce Willis decided the same thing.



The message the film is trying to get across is:

Live your own life, connect with people, consequences are there for a reason.


The message the film actually gets across is:

Technophobic people are dicks and there is nothing more dangerous to peoples happiness than people convinced the world needs saving from something.


As messages go, that's fairly accurate. See George Bush, Osama Bin Laden, Joseph Stalin etc. etc.