Surrogates

Not as good as MINORITY REPORT and definitely much better than Spielberg’s AI – SURROGATES takes you to a future world where people can sit comfortably at home while their ‘surrogate’ can go out and experience the world for them. The people are strapped to chairs that allow them to see, feel, smell, etc the real world, but it is all in their minds. It has a MATRIX vibe to it, but fails to create the ‘new amazing world’ effect that the MATRIX did so effectively.

The story moves into a murder mystery type genre, where Bruce Willis our main protagonist has to find out who is killing all the surrogates and frying their owners minds in the process. It’s pretty standard. There are some nice visuals of the futuristic city, and I really like how they created a future drug-rush through electrocution (I should’ve thought of that – lol).

Nothing with this film was extraordinary or amazing. The acting was on par, but didn’t blow me away, the story/script was mediocre at best, and the takeaways were apparent after the trailer. The takeaway message being: to experience life and true happiness, you have to get your hands dirty. It’s that easy and anyone can pull that from the trailer – like hitting us over the head.

The ending brought back a lot of the film’s value for me. It was one of those endings where you think back and wonder why they couldn’t have poured some of that surrealist flare into the rest of the film. But an awesome ending doesn’t always save the entire film. And that was the case here unfortunately.

Rating: 5/10