Die Hard: The Video Game – ‘Surrogates’ Review…

Posted on October 2, 2009 - 12:44am by michael Mankind’s current tendency to go tearing through our natural resources at breakneck speed has for decades inspired countless science fiction films about our searching in outer space for usable resources or other inhabitable planets. It’s interesting that Surrogates is sharing cineplexes with Pandorum, another futuristic sci-fi film about mankind attempting to send an embryonic population of 16,000 people to a distant, earth-like planet (having completely used up Earth’s sustainable resources). But for all the similarities between the two movies, they could hardly be more different. Pandorum is about a time when the human population has reached almost 25 billion and has completely used up the planet (the year 2174, I believe), resulting in the need to find another planet to live on. Surrogates, on the other hand, takes place in a future not so far off, in which a massive corporation called VSI has created human-like robots called surrogates that people can control from their homes. So you can go out and live your daily life through your surrogate without ever having to leave the safety of your home, and if I remember correctly, a staggering 98% of the world’s population is using surrogates. So one film is about catastrophic over-population, and the other is about a corporation that has become unimaginably successful by effectively doubling the population.. So here’s the story - Surrogate technology is not new, but has now become available to the general public, resulting in a society populated almost entirely with robots, while the real humans generally don’t leave their homes for years at a time. You can choose everything about your surrogate from gender and race to hair color and height, so everyone you meet on the street is a picture of physical perfection, but you have no idea who you’re really talking to when you meet one.  Nevertheless, society has turned into a happily bleached, plasticky utopia  until two surrogates are found dead in an alley. Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) is assigned to the case, and his surrogate's investigations reveal that not only are the robots’ eyes fried in their sockets, but the human operators at home were also killed by the attacks on their unlucky avatars. And in a society like this, the existence of a weapon loose in society that can kill real people through attacks on avatars is a major problem. It would be like a computer virus that fries your hard drive and then kills you. Of course, there are also groups of humans who reject surrogacy as an abomination live in filthy, dilapidated refugee camps throughout the country and are united by their leader, the Prophet (Ving Rhames), who preaches to them about the inevitable destruction of surrogate society through a glorious Civil War, and the subsequent return of real humans to the outside world. It would seem that the hundreds of millions of Terminator-like surrogates would make short work of a few thousand dirty and untrained revolutionaries, but the appearance of this mystery weapon changes everything. Also complicating matters are the mysterious death of the son of the creator of surrogate technology and a suspicious character named Miles Strickland, who’s criminal activities are being covered up but by who and why we don’t know. [caption id="attachment_58778" align="alignleft" width="374" caption="Surrogates are not only popular personal appliances, they also make great golf cart pilots for the Department of Defense!"][/caption] My only real problem with the movie is that is has one of those storylines that raises more questions than it answers. It’s a little on the slow side in the set-up but soon turns into a balls-out action movie that looks a little too much like a Die Hard film. Not that that’s a bad thing, I happen to think that the Die Hard movies are all pretty good (except part 2), but I spent a little too much time daydreaming during high-octane action sequences about things that the movie doesn’t attempt to even briefly consider. For example, it’s reported that racism and crime are down to basically zero as a result of surrogacy. Race, I can understand. You can choose your own race, so no one really knows what race anyone else is anyway. But by midway through the film it becomes clear that surrogates are capable of superhuman feats, like leaping effortlessly from car to car in fast-moving traffic, and if everyone is at home living vicariously through such things, doesn’t it seem like more people would have the nerve to commit crimes? [caption id="attachment_58779" align="alignright" width="398" caption="Prophet, the "Human Coalition Leader.""][/caption] There’s a weak effort to explain this, as we learn that there is an overweight computer wiz up in some office surrounded by computers who can patch into and freeze anyone’s connection with their surrogate should a crime be noted in progress. But are we to believe that they have one guy who can stop all the crimes among hundreds of millions of people? More importantly, let’s get right to the point that you know you’ve all been thinking about from the very beginning - Are surrogates anatomically correct? The premise of this movie has some fascinating prospects for the porn industry, but what really happens when two surrogates meet and are interested in each other? The whole point of surrogacy, after all, is to be able to live your everyday life as someone younger and better looking than yourself, so how do these interactions happen? One takes place early in the movie, a good-looking guy meets a hot blonde at a club and they burst out into an alleyway making out in a fit of passion. What would come next? Would the surrogates have sex with each other? Do their operators – both male, in this case – just masturbate at home while their respective avatars are grab-assing in the alleyway? [caption id="attachment_58780" align="alignleft" width="402" caption="I understand that not only do these freaky set-ups control your surrogates, but they can also be connected to your computer, in case you want to browse the internet or maybe pop in an old DVD copy of The 6th Day."][/caption] Unfortunately, both surrogates and both operators are killed before we can find out, leaving a pestering question that never gets answered. Granted, when we catch glimpses of the people operating the surrogates, the last thing you want to know about them is how they go about getting their creepy jollies, so the movie focuses on more important things like the origins of the mysterious weapon and the extent of its destructive capabilities. As it turns out, with the right access it could destroy every surrogate in the world and simultaneously kill every person operating one. You can see why it becomes a primary concern. Director Jonathan Mostow didn’t exactly blow my hair back with Terminator 3, but he shows in Surrogates that he definitely has some action directing chops. Surrogates isn’t the best action movie of the year, and it's even not quite as good as the trailer makes it look, but it has a great premise based on the graphic novel by Robert Venditti and and Brett Weldele and has excellent performances throughout. There are also some pretty powerful images in the last ten minutes or so that might be the best thing about the whole movie. If by the end you hadn't been left with any lasting images, you'll definitely find them there. The Bean Meter [caption id="attachment_58781" align="aligncenter" width="303" caption="4 Beans out of 5."][/caption]