In Surrogates it is 2017 and, in the America the film shows at least, society is publicly populated by surrogates ('suris"), remotely controlled robot bodies that are invariably stronger and more aesthetically pleasing than the grey, flabby bodies controlling them from darkened bedrooms nationwide. It’s as if Timothy Leary almost got it right: turn on, tune in, lay about.
The evolutionary leap, neatly sketched in the news reports that open Jonathan Mostow’s sci-fi thriller, has resulted in a peaceful, productive world. For reasons unknown crime has plummeted and everyone is happy to live out their lives through a machine that is slightly stiff, bronzed and constructed to exacting specifications. It’s as if Beverly Hills conquered the world.
An exception is FBI agent Jim Greer, who looks like Bruce Willis with a very bad blonde wig. Greer’s problem isn’t a lack of imagination, but ambivalence – he fears that he and his wife, Maggie (Rosamund Pike), have drifted apart since the death of their son in a car accident and her subsequent retreat into living inside her surrogate. It makes him a typically torn investigator when a real person (derogatorily referred to as a 'meatbag") uses an unknown weapon to not only destroy a suri, but also kill its controller half a continent away.
Adapted from Robert Venditti’s 2005 comic book series, Surrogates is uneasily torn between a procedural investigation and creating an artificial world that invests every frame with a new idea and the seed of a philosophical query. Neil Blomkamp’s District 9, and before that Alfonse Cuaron’s Children of Men, are examples of how the two imperative can be seamlessly integrated. In those films the characters and their world inform each other, opening up the milieu even as the plot is progressed.
Surrogates, however, is in too much of a hurry to do anything more than outline a Surrogate staffed life. Mostow offers up some teasing shots, such as a military base where in a vast facility, soldiers fight a foreign war while lying down, simply hooking up to a new surrogate when the old one is destroyed (it’s never explained what’s happening in the third world, where cost, resources and energy usage would prohibit suris). Instead there’s a perfunctory investigation by Greer and his partner, Agent Peters (Radha Mitchell) that unfolds, twist and all, as you’d expect.
This is not the comeback director Mostow needed to make after 2003’s workmanlike Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. His first two features, 1997’s Breakdown and 2000’s U-571 were genuinely impressive genre pieces, especially the latter, where technical skills never overwhelmed a storyteller’s skill at suspense. But this outing is underdone and there are effects sequences – such as Greer in a car pursuing a hijacked surrogate on foot – which look rushed and lack even a patina of visual authenticity.
Torn between plot and world building, Mostow fails to fully deliver either. He does explore Greer’s increasing dislocation from the surrogate lifestyle, with Willis managing to tease some genuine despair from the idea of a man who is repelled by the brave new world he must live in. Beneath the action sequences and the promises of an uninhibited world – no-one really knows who they’re meeting, for example – the film plays to a utopian spirit that began with the Puritans who helped colonise America four centuries ago. It wants us to get back to nature.
