Surrogates, Perfect Body, Tortured Soul?

Imagine that you could have perfect breasts, six pack abs and never age; that you could leap higher than any Olympic athlete, run faster than a Preakness winner and make love to the most beautiful people you’ve ever seen. You can! Just buy a Surrogate and plug in. You too can be anyone you want just pay enough to VSI corporation and let them do the rest. Excellent!

Surrogates, the new film starring Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames, James Cromwell and Rosamund Pike, is a chillingly realistic look at a possible future where no one leaves home. They leave that to their perfect avatar. How enticing and predictable. More and more people spend countless hours chatting, instant messaging and playing World of Warcraft with best friends they’ve never met. How much better would it be for my perfect self to meet your perfect self in “real” life and fall madly in love, no risk, great reward?

Surrogates works… the artificial look to the perfect human faces, the Botox like lack of expression and the barely perceptible hesitation in response give the film an otherworldly effect that sells the idea. At first it seems great: no one grows old, except hidden in their rooms, a surrogate gets destroyed, get another one, don’t have to take risks, let your surrogate do that. Everything is idyllic until a little problem occurs, there are ripples in the perfect pool. Two surrogates are destroyed and their owners with them.

James Cromwell is Canter, the inventor of the surrogate program. He originally intended surrogates to aid those with disabilities, including him, to walk and to function as real people, not as a means for real people to escape into some fantasy. The VSI Corporation disagreed and, after a lengthy battle, Canter was sacked. VSI became the great provider of surrogates for the country and Canter became a bitter old man. When Canter’s son is killed, his anger turns so virulent that when Agent Greer (Bruce Willis) is called in to investigate, he finds the man unreachable.

Surrogates is one of the better Science Fiction films in recent years. Its plot is simple but elegant, the writing good, if simple, and the story elements excellent. The Cinematography is stunning, the CGI is crystal clear and spot on and the editing is nearly flawless.

What makes the film, though, is that an FBI agent (Willis) who's only looking to get  his wife back, and is willing to go to the edge of sanity and death to help her, manages to be a real person. Surrogates is one of Willis’s best performances and his simple tears are real.

There are few flaws in the film. Though I’m sure Surrogates will be knocked for its action packed theme (and it’s really good), its lack of heavyweight performers and its simple message, Surrogates is a good film and worth seeing.

3.5 stars out of 5.