The Happy Goat

I had a lot of energy on my drive home from work today.  I was all set to take care of some stuff at home, return a few phone calls that had been piling up, you know, that sort of thing.  Then I remembered that I had advance tickets to Surrogates at 7:30, and figured I would still be OK.  Nothing like a good action movie with Bruce Willis and a bunch of robots to start off the evening, right?

That question unfortunately remains unanswered, because what I saw was not a good action movie with Bruce Willis and a bunch of robots.  Nor was it one of those horrible action movies that are fun to rail on for all their blatant shortcomings.  It was 88 minutes of medium-paced, shoddily-written-but-capably-acted “meh”.

The first thing that pops to mind is that the writers (who before this gave us other such “meh” as Terminator 3 and Catwoman), approached this project with the same attitude I did before I knew anything about it.  Bruce Willis.  Ving Rhames as a villain.  Robots.  Sexy actresses.  People are going to see this by the boatload, regardless of what we write in this script, so let’s just get a case of Mountain Dew and slam this thing out in a weekend, then start clearing out our schedules so we can spend weeks and weeks counting all of the money we’re going to make.

Opens today in theaters everywhere

A lot of the plot elements, and particularly any pieces of exposition, just seem phoned in.  The concept is a solid one:  15-20 years in the future, we invent lifelike robots that can be remotely controlled by people.  This is an awesome concept for several reasons.  Everyone can be hotter, stronger, faster, and basically invincible.  Did you get run over by a car on the way to work?  No problem, your robot might be hosed, but you can always just go out and buy a new one.  Perfect, right?  Of course, with every trend there’s a counter-culture movement, and in this movie it’s the “dreds” (or “dreads”, the movie wasn’t really clear on that).  This is a group of people who are fine with how they are, don’t want to be using surrogates, and don’t want to associate with them either.  They live in little enclaves near major cities that are basically autonomous and pretty trashy.  They make a big deal out of showing solar panels and windmills to remind us that they’re generating their own electricity and therefore disconnected with the outside world.  A few scenes of surrogate-on-human “hate crimes” demonstrate some degree of racial (i guess) tension?  What I just laid out demonstrates two huge flaws in the whole basis of the movie that I just couldn’t get my head around.

First: you have two societies.  One is composed of people so insecure that they need to prance around represented by robots, and because they are represented by robots, there are virtually no consequences for any of their actions.  They are all gorgeous, super-strong, and completely anonymous to the world.  The other one is filled with people who are either confident and comfortable enough with themselves to not want such a robot, or pragmatic enough to reject the whole concept.  One of these is a smooth-running, orderly society, and the other one is a dystopian wasteland loosely-governed by Ving Rhames in a Bob Marley costume.  Can you guess which is which?

Second: Robots, controlled by humans, calling humans “meat bags.”  Robot cops, controlled by human cops, calling a fellow cop who is not currently using his robot a “meat bag.”  How can this group of humans be so smart that they invent an army of lifelike robots, but so stupid that they hate…themselves?  Each other?  Bueller?

The Bottom Line: Maybe I’m thinking about this too hard.  It’s an OK movie.  The acting is good, and I guess most people who can suspend their disbelief enough to accept humanlike robots can ignore the rest of the contrived stuff this movie’s plot throws at you.  One last thing:  this movie is set at least 15 years in the future, so why is Bruce Willis driving around in a 2006 Toyota Prius?  More to the point, why is anyone driving anything anywhere, when most of them don’t have to leave their houses, and they can park their robots that never get tired wherever they want and…oh, never mind.  I can’t wait to see what these clowns do with xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, coming our way in 2011.