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** If you haven't seen commercials for this, there will be spoilers, however, I'm not revealing anything that isn't obvious from the trailer. **
Bruce Willis' new movie, Surrogates, follows a police detective trying to figure out who and what could have started killing humans, by killing their synthetic surrogates. The future is "peopled" with machines that aren't sentient, but can do everything their human operators are thinking, and relay back all the images they are seeing. So, humans can stay in their home forever, while a better version of themselves, physically, can walk the world. The machines were designed for people with disabilities, so they could more normally experience the world. However, the rest of the world became addicted to never having to wash their hair, or exercise, or get dressed, instead sending their surrogate out in the world to represent them while they operated it from the safety of their home. But someone has made a weapon that will kill a human by destroying their surrogate. Bruce Willis and his partner,Radha Mitchell, investigate leads that bring them to one of the "reservations" of people who refuse to use surrogates, no machines allowed. Lots of complicated ethical questions prevail, but none are developed too deeply, so the movie stays at a light level throughout, though the fight scenes are pretty fun given that machines are doing a lot of the fighting. I think if Bruce Willis' character had been written more like his Die Hard or The Fifth Element characters, this movie would have been more fun along the same lines as those movies. Instead Willis is flat, and none of his dialogue is memorable, which is disappointing given his skill at sarcasm and grouchy cop banter. It's a pretty good movie, and fits well into it's futuristic, sci-fi genre, arguing that to be fully human, you need to experience the world yourself, much like the better Matrix and I, Robot argue convincingly. 3.5 stars/lambs
Bruce Willis' new movie, Surrogates, follows a police detective trying to figure out who and what could have started killing humans, by killing their synthetic surrogates. The future is "peopled" with machines that aren't sentient, but can do everything their human operators are thinking, and relay back all the images they are seeing. So, humans can stay in their home forever, while a better version of themselves, physically, can walk the world. The machines were designed for people with disabilities, so they could more normally experience the world. However, the rest of the world became addicted to never having to wash their hair, or exercise, or get dressed, instead sending their surrogate out in the world to represent them while they operated it from the safety of their home. But someone has made a weapon that will kill a human by destroying their surrogate. Bruce Willis and his partner,Radha Mitchell, investigate leads that bring them to one of the "reservations" of people who refuse to use surrogates, no machines allowed. Lots of complicated ethical questions prevail, but none are developed too deeply, so the movie stays at a light level throughout, though the fight scenes are pretty fun given that machines are doing a lot of the fighting. I think if Bruce Willis' character had been written more like his Die Hard or The Fifth Element characters, this movie would have been more fun along the same lines as those movies. Instead Willis is flat, and none of his dialogue is memorable, which is disappointing given his skill at sarcasm and grouchy cop banter. It's a pretty good movie, and fits well into it's futuristic, sci-fi genre, arguing that to be fully human, you need to experience the world yourself, much like the better Matrix and I, Robot argue convincingly. 3.5 stars/lambs
4 comments:
I haven't had much of a desire to see this. Your recap did a good job of reinforcing that for me. :-)
Yeah, if you're not a big sci-fi fan, then it'll be pretty bad.
Yeah, you're math on this is spot-on. All of the characters are pretty flat, and Willis' husband-wife storyline feels tacked on and you never end up caring at all about it. I might've liked to see this in better directorial hands and perhaps fleshed out a bit more.
The concept felt like fun (I only saw the preview) in a Philip K. Dick / William Gibson kind of way (using sci-fi to explore the source of identity), but I'm not surprised to learn the execution was lame. It does seem silly not to use the Willis penchant for sarcasm!
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