Science Infraction

It seems that Bruce Willis likes science fiction. He'll go along for a stretch taking roles in more "conventional" Hollywood fare, but then every now and then, he'll go and make a movie like 12 Monkeys or The Fifth Element, showing that he really has a soft spot for scifi.

Of course, they can't all be as good as 12 Monkeys or The Fifth Element. Which brings me to last year's Surrogates. The movie is set in a future where robotic technology allows people to transfer their consciousness into a completely lifelike robot. The technology has almost completely saturated the world, and led to a lifestyle where people never really go out in public for real. Instead, they jack into a chair in their homes, transfer into a robot, and go out into the world that way. It allows people to present whatever version of themselves they want to the rest of the world, and take part in any manner of dangerous activities they choose without risk of personal bodily harm. The violent crime rate has dropped to be virtually non-existent -- destroying a robot isn't murder, just a form of vandalism.

It's a kind of intriguing premise. Somewhere in there, an author like Philip K. Dick could probably have probed some fascinating moral and social issues under this umbrella. The whole thing is based on a graphic novel; perhaps the source material did exactly that.

The movie, however, leaves behind the intellectual material almost immediately, opting instead for typically mindless action. Bruce Willis somehow becomes the one man who can stop a group of people from undermining this "paradise" with their efforts to make people see that embracing "robot surrogacy" is wrong -- even though he is conflicted on the subject himself. (See, he's a deep character, folks!) There are foot chases, car chases, helicopter chases, fist fights, gun fights, chases, fights, chases, fights, chases! And all packed into an easily digestible little 90 minute package so your poor wittle attention span doesn't get too strained.

And it's all capped off with a ludicrous climax. You have to either accept that some slobbish computer hacker figures out a one-button fix to a problem in 15 seconds that a revolutionary genius couldn't unravel with years to work on it; or accept that said genius, once a man with dreams of helping all humankind, is now the sort of man eager to kill billions. Either way, it blows.

Of course, even in the good Bruce Willis scifi films, a large part of the appeal is to see him in the big action beats. He's got a gift for it, and it's well on display here. Also, the film is rather well realized visually. If only the scriptwriters had put half the thought into making a coherent universe as the art department clearly did, there might have been something worthy of the grand promise of the film's setup. As it is, it's a C+ effort at best.