Surrogates

Surrogates begins itself by taking the viewer to the distant world of tomorrow. It is a world where technology has advanced far enough to allow humans to live their lives through the aid of a robot called a "surrogate". The surrogate will walk and talk like a normal human, but beyond their eyes is a dead soul-less void with no hope of becoming anything more than just a pile of scrap metal. This was my impression of the movie. It was a adequate (albeit, incredibly overdone) idea that was simply handled terribly and executed by firing squad.

The Matrix and I Robot are much better examples of how to pull off this kind of film, and it would be fun to go through both movies compared to Surrogates to see exactly where it went wrong. Perhaps it was the incredibly forced, and almost mechanical dialogue? Say whatever you want about the intended "style" of the film; there is no reason, ever, for dialogue to be so unbearable that you begin to rewrite it in your mind in a desperate attempt to make it sound human.

This film in general went in several directions that I hated. Why did the surrogate humans need to be so obviously fake? Why did the inside wiring of said surrogates need to be green? Why were there so many not-so-veiled jabs at the anonymity of the Internet? I wasn't digging the almost campy art direction of this movie, and as stated above, I was simply not smellin' what the dialogue was cookin'.

About halfway through the film however, the story took a surprising turn and began to interest me. Although this phenomenon only lasted for about thirty minutes, a faint glimmer of hope sparkled under the ocean of poor choices that this movie made. The story took some interesting twists and turns, and caused my eyebrows to express a look of mild surprise for about ten minutes. If I was under the impression, however, that the story would propel this movie out of mediocrity, I was sorely mistaken. The above average middle sequence turned out to be a fluke in this mess of a film. The story found a way to coup-de-gras the audience's hope that they hadn't wasted their money. Then the credits rolled.

In the end, Surrogates turned out to be a terrible jaunt into the not-so-likely future. It was cold, distant, and although it offered a few genuine thrills, it was not able to hold my attention for the mercifully short 88 minute running time.

I would not reccomend this movie.

D