Surrogates

In an attempt to straddle the wide gap between concept-driven sci-fi and mainstream sci-action, Surrogates manages to fall just short of satisfying either audience. To make matters worse, Bruce Willis appears throughout most of the movie in the guise of his eerily de-aged robot Surrogate, in what can only be described as a heebie-jeebie-worthy performance. The "high-concept" story at the root of Surrogates asks audiences to suspend a great deal of disbelief and imagine a world where 90-percent of the global population interacts with the world solely through "Surrogate" robots while their actual bodies stay home, safe and sound. This implausible future isn't fleshed out in a logical manner and the issues that would arise from such a reality are stripped down to focus only on what is necessary to make it through the story. From what we see the only major repercussion to the entire world living life through remote controlled robot substitutes comes down to little more than some civil discord between the Surrogate users and a rag-tag band of extremist anti-technology rebels. The tension between Surrogate users and the hippies comes to a head when a new weapon that can remotely cook users' brains hits the streets and it's left up to officer Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) to stop the murder of millions of innocent people. As a pleasant change of pace from the usual filler material crammed onto DVDs, Surrogates is light on features, with only a director's commentary and a music video. Surrogates is a mildly entertaining sci-action film but, ultimately, is pretty forgettable. Anyone who likes old school, '70s-style, one-note sci-fi like Westworld, Logan's Run or Rollerball might enjoy the oversimplified story style, but Surrogates lacks the fully realized vision of the future that audiences have come to expect from modern, big budget sci-fi.