AMONG cheesy sci-fi movies meant to make you think, I’ll take “Surrogates” over “District 9.”
Both are highly derivative, but in the course of recombining the basic chromosomes of “Blade Runner,” “The Matrix” and especially “I, Robot,” “Surrogates” nudges the robo-thriller in an interesting direction.
Bruce Willis plays a detective with an appalling wig (floppy and blond) and doll-smooth skin. But don’t worry. You’ll be seeing him bald and modeling a face like the bottom of a rock climber’s boot soon enough.
The principal fun of the movie is not the fairly routine suspense and action sequences, which depend heavily on a couple of car chases and such wheezing devices as a computer monitor charting the progress of a download that could change everything.
The fun is in the world it creates — so read no further if you’d rather not have a clever situation spoiled.
The Willis characters are both a tired old couch potato, who sits home all day with gizmos hooked up to his brain, and his avatar or “surrogate” — a remote-controlled puppet, all but indistinguishable from a living human being, that does his bidding.
The visible world is pretty much solely populated by these “surreys” — fitter, younger, more beautiful versions of the dumpy, unshaven dirtbags who control them without ever leaving the house. A more derisive term for the puppets: “Yodas.”
Not convinced that large numbers of people want to live vicariously? Two words: “The Sims.”
The conceit is an amazingly flexible satiric instrument that simultaneously spoofs video and online gamers, Hollywood (the streets of Boston are filled with impossibly good-looking people — yet they all have a creepy waxworks quality), drug addiction and sloth.
Why put on makeup, work out or even change out of your bathrobe? Your surrey always looks good. The amount of difficulty I had imagining an America that has reached this stage of techno-gorged passivity wasn’t large.
As the Willis character tries to solve a murder in which an attack on a surrogate was used to fry the brain of the real person controlling it, director Jonathan Mostow and writers Michael Ferris and John D. Bracanto keep the pedal down with lots of possible motives and suspects. They include cops, the military and a rasta radical (Ving Rhames, looking good in dreadlocks) who represents the “dreaders” — feisty holdout humans who refuse to filter experience through surrogates and have been shunted off into robot-free reservations.
Several scenes look like outtakes from “I, Robot,” and James Cromwell pops up playing the same role he played in that movie, which had far more impressive special effects.
But it and “Blade Runner,” with their endless ruminating about whether robots have feelings, miss an important point brought up by “Surrogates.”
A potent insight of this film is that surrogates would really catch on among parents, who would of course get robots to stand in for their kids to keep them safe. Kids would grow up thinking that never leaving the couch is perfectly natural. Aren’t our wee ones already becoming Wii ones?