Z/Web

I love robots and this is sort of a robot story: “surrogates” are mechanical duplicates of people that can be remotely controlled, so people never have to leave their homes and can always be safe. They operate their surrogate to go to work, travel, take physical risks, etc. It’s a neat idea and the film actually hints at the sociological impact of such technology. Unfortunately, within minutes of the beginning the film shows us illogic by telling us that surrogates were invented a mere 14 years ago and that now 98% of the population uses surrogates. Huh? It took like 50 years for cars to be common and the whole world will switch to remote controlled robots in just 14 years? That sent up red flags for me and the rest of the film’s illogic made it painful to watch.

There are some neat ideas (i.e. humans = ugly, robots = pretty), and the special effects of a young Bruce Willis as a robot is pretty cool, but the story is far too convoluted with a murder conspiracy and technology that can kill the human operator remotely. The ending isn’t that bad and has a preachy moral message for us (“be human”), but the whole film feels like pieces that don’t fit together. The plot’s a mishmash of ideas and the film bounces around between talky/social commentary scenes and action as though it can’t decide what kind of film it wants to be. The action feels like it was thrown in to sell the film and the robot action looks like badly faked digital. Nothing makes much sense, but strangely, I still kind of liked this movie. It’s fun, proposes some unusual ideas, and some of the performances are interesting. There’s not much meat on this bone despite the heavy-handed approach to preaching, but if you can ignore that and the giant plot holes, there are worse ways to waste a couple hours.