Surrogates Review
Russell Burlingame Reporting
Surrogates, an adaptation of Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele's graphic novel, hit the cinemas last weekend and was almost immediately declared a disappointment. In spite of Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames and a strong concept, viewer reaction to the film wasn't great and box-office performance was pretty mediocre, too. It came in at #2 for the week, behind Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which had already been in the theater for a while.
The
idea of the film is that "surrogates"-that is, robots capable of living your
life for you while you sit in your house, strapped to a "stim chair," seeing
what the robot sees and controlling its movements but not risking any physical
harm to yourself-have become incredibly commonplace. Early in the film a
representative of the company that makes them, cites a study that 90% of
everybody seems to have one to live their day-to-day lives for them. Given that
any damage done to the 'bot can't hurt you, things like fights and murder seem
pretty pointless and crime rates are way, way down. Of course, this all comes
apart when two people die-apparently as a result of damage done to their
surrogates-in a 24-hour period and a pair of FBI agents are assigned to see
what's happened. Nobody much benefits from telling these agents the truth, of
course, since everyone has a surrogate and nobody much wants to see the system
fall apart-least of all the father of the first victim, who invented surrogates
in the first place.
Bruce Willis subverts the expectation of "craggy old cop," by using his surrogate. Having not read the graphic novel before seeing the film, I almost expected him to be the guy who walks around "real" in a world of machines, creating the kind of "outsider" archetype that he embodies in Die Hard and Sin City, but it works better for him not to in this film. His "Yes, sir; I lost a son myself" comes out cold and unemotional from inside the surrogate's voicebox, and that improves the impact. That role, oddly, is served by a hacker at FBI headquarters who doesn't have a surrogate for himself and who seems to view the whole thing as a really cool video game. When he does things that skirt the edge of the law, and is confronted, his response is, "Oh, come on! We're the good guys," and a return to his sandwich and computers. Willis eventually does revert to being the man against the world, but it's circumstance and not a sense of curmudgeonly anger that pushes him in that direction.
Ultimately
the film tries to be too many things and fails to completely grasp any of
them-it's a conspiracy film, it's an action film, it's Blade Runner-lite,
it's a meditation on our materialistic, technology-addicted culture. In the
grand scheme of things they would have done better to focus on one or two (and
frankly, it's the last of those that worked the best in the movie, when it was
being properly applied) and gone with it. It's disappointing to see James
Cromwell in such a lifeless role; it's been some time since I saw him in a movie
and frankly he's a great actor who doesn't get a chance to bring much to the
table with this script. All of his best moments are just callbacks from scenes
he'd already had in L.A. Confidential.
There's a second graphic novel out this month, and I think I remember hearing about a big, hardbound edition of both stories as Top Shelf looks to capitalize on the press generated by a mainstream, Bruce Willis-starring film...but we'll see if that happens, given the stink of failure that's being unfairly attached to this entertaining little flick.
Russell Burlingame is a journalist and columnist living and working in New York City. In high school, Russell interviewed Elliot S. Maggin for a review of the Kingdom Come novelization, and since then has worked consistently in and around the comics industry. He interned for Wizard magazine, and has freelanced for Wizard and Newsarama, in addition to a number of non-comics publications, Russell is currently working on a graphic novel based on Cap'n Internet, the comic strip that ran in his college newspaper; and a graphic biography of folk singer Phil Ochs with artist Marion Vitus.
Currently, in addition to his freelance work and his comics projects, Russell writes a number of columns for ComicRelated, including Conscientious Sequentials, The Gold Exchange, What's Perhappenin', Closing Statements, Reflecting 'Pool and To See or Not To See.
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