Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Surrogates

Bruce Willis (Die Hard) plays a troubled detective who has lost his son in a seemingly utopian world which quickly begins to disturb and frighten people as their utopia is broken by a strange killer. The source of Utopia is a highly advanced prosthetic designed to allow quadripelegics complete use bodies, as well as a replacement for soldiers.
            The prosthetic known as a surrogate advances rapidly and within 20 years, everyone uses surrogates. Trouble arises when Willis’s character reports to the scene of an alleged assault on a surrogate. The deviance arises when it appears that the two operators were both killed by the assault, something that is not supposed to be possible through a surrogate.
            Matters are complicated further by a variety of elements including a religious sec which protests all use of surrogates as abominations led by their prophet (Ving Rames, Baby Boy). Their hatred of surrogates leads Willis to question the group, forcing him to venture out into the real world without a surrogate, encountering real pain.
            The complications arise when it is clear that multiple people are conspiring on both sides of the mystery, and further complications arise when a jailbreak program is discovered allowing anyone the user to control any surrogate, not simply one that has been biocoded to him or her.
            You can see the Sci as well as the Fi are working overtime in this unique thriller, which, although it is predictable, it is still a unique take on the dominance of posthumanity and the on going discussion of what it truly means to be human. In a very interesting twist, the assumption here, as well as in Gamer, is that rather than the matrix-esque isolation offered in virtual reality being imposed on humanity, is voluntarily requested, effectively demonstrating a Huxleyan dystopia in contrast to an Orwellian vision. I give it a 2. Also, this is yet another graphic novel transformed for the big screen, although many changes to the story were made, so of course I liked it. I'm easy to please though.

No comments:

Post a Comment