A Disney sci-fi film starring Bruce Willis that has review embargoes until the night before it is released in cinemas: to me that sounded like a recipe for a disaster. Even though we have been running the trailer for a few weeks, which made it look like an interesting film, as any regular cinemagoer will tell you, they are not to be trusted. So were my doubts founded? Well, yes and no.
The film’s concept is a solid one: Imagine a world where you can look exactly how you want and do whatever you want without fear of physical restraints or pain by remotely controlling a robotic proxy of the vision of the perfect you, without ever having to leave your house. It sounds exactly like an advanced version of Second Life, except the avatars are real rather than virtual. In this ideal cybernetic world crime is almost not existent, and murder has stopped completely. As always, there are groups of outsiders, led by the charismatic Prophet, played by Ving Rhames with dreads and a beard, who consider that surrogates are actually destroying humanity, not improving it. Everything is fine until one night two surrogates are attacked and their operators killed, one of whom happened to be the son of the inventor of the surrogates. It is up to FBI Agent Thomas Greer (Bruce Willis looking younger than he did as PI David Addison in Moonlighting) and his partner Jennifer Peters to investigate. However, when Greer’s surrogate is destroyed he is suspended from duty but decides to continue the investigation in his much older real body, uncovering a complex conspiracy.
Although the ideas are good and will generate plenty of discussion, it is the plot holes and inconsistent logic that will cause the most debate. I’m not going to bring them up in this review, as they are all involved in the crucial plot points and I don’t like to give spoilers, but they will be self-evident if you see the film. On the plus side, the action set pieces are pretty spectacular and Bruce Willis does a good job of playing younger and older versions of himself, even if some of the dialogue sounded like it had come straight off the pages of a comic (on which it was based). For the most part the film reminded me of I, ROBOT in both look and feel, so that will give you a fair idea of what to expect.
Once I’d stopped agonising about the plot holes (about a minute), the conspiracy theorist in me did start wondering if this wasn’t some sort of surreptitious marketing ploy by Disney to see what the public’s reaction would be to the idea of having surrogates. After all, they have manufactured pop stars (although the recent models have been known to go into meltdown), and Disneyland has had lifelike animatronics for ages. And with Steve Jobs a major shareholder in Disney maybe we will be seeing the iRobot at a Apple developers’ conference in the near future (and check out the video clip below too).
SURROGATES is out now through Walt Disney Studios.