yes: i am writing an essay on this movie. i don't even know what to say. just stick with me ok? i'd like to talk about a piece of scifi naïf *, a scifi movie that's so unwilling to think and actually be scifi it nearly circles back to being interesting to think about. i've decided to call it naïf not just because i'm a pretentious art student, but because the sciency fictiony elements in this movie are so surface level that it's just naive in how it handles this fictional future / scenario. in short it's a boomer movie ok. whatever. let's go.
surrogates is a 2009 scifi action cop movie starring none other than bruce willis. if you haven't watched it (and really, you have no reason to), here's the plot: the year is (presumably?) 202X. basically everyone (and this is hollywood everyone so. you know) has a surrogate, which is a robot body that you control out and about. some people think surrogates are bad and form a human coalition (they're basically just like. normal ass people living in communes). a guy has a weapon that kills both the surrogate and the person operating it. our cop protag sets out to aprehend him yadda yadda, the guy who created surrogates think humanity has lost its essence and regrets it all and plans to kill everyone using a surrogate but bruce willis is having none of that and like does something to stop it, except he only stops the part of killing everyone and still lets the virus fry all surrogates in the world, because he grew to dislike surrogates because his wife has been distant. got all that? good.
now, i could break the movie down in its own terms and analyse its story but it's just not worth it. what i do find fascinating, however, is how this blockbuster movie that performed worse than cloudy with a chance of meatballs (remember that movie?) refuses to engage with its supposed genre: science fiction. surrogates is a masterpiece of lack of imagination and that kinda compels me. it's a comic book adaptation, but i know jack shit about that and will pretend the movie is its own thing, because i doubt anyone in the world ever watched the movie because they read the comics (apparently the comics are set in the 2050s. but i don't think that's what the movie was going for anyway).
what i mean by "not engaging with scifi" here is that the movie presents a lot of situations you'd think would be addressed, but instead just feel like an aesthetic backdrop lifted from other media. several times the movie brings up the disconnect between someone's flesh ("real") body and their surrogate — twice for transphobic... jokes?, of course. two different white men "wear" black surrogates (one for quasi-spiritual leadership reasons, the other... is a side character so who knows. watch get out by the way). the ads for surrogates (styled after beauty products) are painted in a negative light — but it's not to criticize the beauty industry, it's because willis is a tough guy and beauty products are for shallow women (like his wife). surrogacy supposedly ended all crime, particularly violent one. surrogates can be, at any time, used as de facto wiretaps by the FBI, and even remotely disconnected (don't worry, he got a warrant and hey it was to protect a victim of assault!). surrogates have failsafes to protect the operator (which i have to assume is also carried by mechanical turks* like the FBI guy)
what's most fascinating to me is this mindless parroting of tropes and questions. it's rather morbidly compelling to see a movie that seems to be actively trying to forget about itself in order to say "kids these days always in their computers" (there weren't smartphones back then ok). watching the movie in 2022 with even half a brain means using the godawful action scenes to think about how not only are surrogates a bizarre tool of mass surveillance disguised as a must-have tool for work and leisure, but also how it's a system impossible to hold at arms length.
throughout the movie, surrogates are made to be a love it or leave it situation. you either accept that having a surrogate is necessary (for the kind of people hollywood is concerned with, of course) or leave "civilization" entirely, living on "human reservations" (yeah hello??) without technology. willis (and thus the movie) seems to hold contempt for both groups. it doesn't truly engage with the "meatbags", they're just vaguely backwards, fighting a useless battle. as for the users, they're frivolous addicts who can't handle pain or getting old or something. cool! but hey don't think about any of these things. just look at willis fighting for humankind to get offline and play in the park with their kids or something.
in short, the beauty of this movie, to me, lies in how in pretending this is not scifi, but cop action-drama with a robot gimmick, it lays bare what the writers take for granted and assume to be the default unchangeable society. the movie inhabits a sort of fuzzy area where it vaguely wants to use scifi themes and bring up important stuff about society but also by god it doesn't want to challenge anything. it creates and solves its own problem of surrogacy, not only in isolation from any paralels to the real world, but also in the least nuanced way possible (no more surrogates at all, but, very explicitly, no one dies). and i wonder if that complete dettachment isn't actually harder to do.
