Film Review : Surrogates

Occasionally you see a film where a couple of days contemplation allows you to consider the hidden depths in the ideas expressed, and to perhaps feel that a second viewing might be necessary to understand the complexities of the gripping story line. Surrogates isn't one of those films.

Which is not to say that it's not a perfectly servicable popcorn movie - but it's one that you can safely disengage the more distant parts of your brain when watching.

Bruce Willis plays.........well, he plays Bruce Willis as a police detective in a world where real life has been replaced by a virtual reality played through robots...or surrogates....which allow people to live their lives and do just what they want to do in a society that is almost crime-free.

Needless to say (and you can see this coming, can't you) things are not quite so straight-forward and real humans find themselves being killed via their surrogates, which had not been thought possible. Of course, Bruce is required to solve the mystery in typical Bruce fashion.

As seems to be a contractual obligation, Bruce's marriage is a little shaky and this (along with the protaginists reasons for his actions) form the human element of the story. However, what the film doesn't really attempt to do (and which might have run the risk of making it a bit too cerebral) was to consider the impact on the individual of living your life as what amounts to no more and no less than a fantasy. The human element revolves around two family deaths but which in themselves are no different from the tragedies we need to deal with in our own reality.

Having said that, the film was a perfectly enjoyable hour and a half of my life that I can't feel too bitter at having lost but it simply doesn't wrestle with enough challenging (or even unchallenging) ideas to raise it above that.