The premise may seem far-fetched, but not if you consider that Morocco offered bomb-sniffing monkeys to the “coalition of the willing” for the Iraq War. The leader of the G-Force team is an unconventional human scientist named Ben. The guinea pigs are cast as racial stereotypes.
Surrogates is a case of a sci-fi movie with a half-decent concept executed poorly with a cast of B-list actors and a budget that was obviously way too low.
This movie is set in the future, where humans no longer go out in public for any reason. Instead, a robotic “Surrogate” is piloted by the humans and society has benefitted as a result – there’s virtually no crime and everyone is attractive. You have to wonder if the film’s producers did their research before deciding on the timing of this release. There was another, slightly bigger budget sci-fi epic about humans interacting via “avatars” that sort of stole the spotlight on this concept.
Surrogates is such a waste of two hours and so obviously bad that it’s not even worth typing about. Instead, let’s imagine how much better this movie would have been if instead of robots, humans interacted using 8-inch tall Barbie and Ken dolls.
Bruce Willis dons his familiar action hero role as Tom Greer, and adorns a silly bleach-blonde wig as a surrogate. The parted hair, suit, and plastic expression that Willis wears through much of the movie is already a spot-on impersonation of a Ken doll, so you might as well go the whole way and film the movie Robot Chicken style using the toy figurine.
Instead of saving money by driving around present-day cars like a Ford Taurus and Toyota Prius (apparently this society wasn’t affected by the recall), you could film all the car chase scenes using futuristic looking toy cars. Hell, you could even have them turn into flying cars if you wanted to.
The movie’s gorier action scenes would be infinitely more entertaining as we watch doll limbs fly off and paint scratched off to reveal colourless plastic. Surrogates goofy twist gimmicks would also take on a whole new meaning when Ken’s paints were yanked down to reveal he has no real genetalia.
Surrogates movie trailer.
This movie was such a box office bomb that it’s unlikely people would even consider sending their robot servants out to see it. That makes a sequel unlikely, but if they do one – let’s hope for two hours of hearing Willis do his raspy voice-over for Ken.
Tags: avatar, bruce willis, surrogates