A Newer, Worse You

At this point we tend to think that Hollywood understands how to adapt comic books for film. We’ve had a long run of successful comic book franchises becoming big-budget films, not just with the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. but also the SpidermanSure, DC Comics has Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, but among the most popular superheroes stands a guy from Marvel Comics, a younger hero dressed in red and blue who shoots webs and sticks to walls. Introduced in the 1960s, Spider-Man has been a constant presence in comics and more, featured in movies regularly since his big screen debut in 2002., X-MenLaunched in 1963 and written by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the X-Men featured heroes distinctly different from those featured in the pages of DC Comics. Mutants who didn't ask for their powers (and very often didn't want them), these heroes, who constantly fought against humans who didn't want "muties" around, served as metaphors for oppression and racism. Their powerful stories would form this group into one of the most recognizable superhero teams in comics (and a successful series of movies as well)., and BladeWhen his mother was bitten by a vampire while Blade was still in the womb, it passed their powers onto him without all their weaknesses. Now he stalks the night, fighting the very creatures that made him. films before it. Since 1998 there have been creatives that have shown they get how to take comic books ideas, and comic book characters to the big screen, so you’d think a solid detective story like The Surrogates would have been an easy story for Hollywood to adapt.

Honestly, The Surrogates is the type of story that doesn’t even feel particularly comic book-y. A detective catches a double-homicide and ends up working a case that leads him directly to an unconventional, but not entirely unexpected, villain. The only difference is that the murders in question involve a sci-fi conceit that ad;ds a layer of world building and intrigue. In the right hands this could have been a sci-fi Neo Noir, dark and gritty with a real edge to it. Even if Hollywood didn’t want to directly adapt The Surrogates as it appeared on the page, it would have been easy to fit the story into any one of a number of tried-and-true genres to make the adaptation work.

And, in a way, studio Touchstone Pictures did, in fact, make this film feel like another work in a similar vein. It just so happens that the work in question was 2004’s I, Robot, a film no one really liked despite making $353.1 Mil at the Box Office (presumably because Will Smith was in that movie). Surrogates, the 2009 adaptation of Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele’s five issue series, looks and feels a lot like I, Robot, right down to bringing in James Cromwell to play the creator of the technobabble at the center of the story. Unfortunately, apparently, audiences just weren’t that interested in this film, or at least not interested in it if Bruce Willis is playing the cop at the center of the murder investigation, as Surrogates only made $122.4 Mil against its $80 Mil budget. Although, really, the fact that the film sucks didn’t help matters at all.

On paper the movie vaguely resembles the plot of the comic. Willis stars as Tom Greer, an FBI agent who catches a case of surrogate vandalism. As we learn, surrogates are android bodies that humans jack into for full sensory experience. People buy surrogates and use them to handle all the functions of their daily lives, becoming dependent on the tech. These surrogates provide the opportunity for humans to be newer, better versions of themselves on the outside, all while taking on none of the risk of real life. It can all be fun and games, at least until a murderer comes along.

Checking into the two victims who had to have watched their surrogates get destroyed, Greer and his partner, Jennifer Peters (Radha Mitchell), discover that whatever fried the surrogates also fried humans controlling them. A simple vandalism case has suddenly become a double-homicide. Someone is out there with a device that fries surrogates and, somehow, it bypasses all the safeties and firewalls built into the tech, passing the full damage along. Now Greer and Peters have to hunt down the man that did this not only to find out why but also to see if they made the tech. If not, someone else even more powerful is ready to murder people through their surrogates, which could become a world wide problem.

The basic concept of Surrogates is interesting, as it was in the comic it’s based on. The idea that you could have a version of yourself out in the world that you control without any fear of danger, a version that looks the way you were, or better, has a certain sci-fi appeal to it. This taps into the human need to stay young, to stay beautiful, to find some kind of immortality. The tech lets everyone be their best selves (or a fearless version there of), and that works in a kind of allegorical sense to shine a light back onto ourselves.

If only the film were smart enough to handle that. The script is both unbelievably blunt and incredibly stupid. From the start it doubts that we can understand the basics of the tech or immerse ourselves in the world, so it spends five minutes doing a historical montage just to explain everything to us. This kind of intro stops a film in its tracks before it even starts, killing momentum. Our brains are now full of weightless facts that we have to keep in mind, facts that we could have learned organically through the flow of the story naturally, but instead it’s all bogged down.

The film tries to pick things up, filming its opening investigative scene like a Noir, with harsh lighting, shadowy figures, and a lot of intrigue. That drains off pretty quickly, though, as the director, Jonathan Mostow, clearly doesn’t understand how a Noir film is supposed to work. Instead he shifts over into standard police procedural filming, sucking life and substance out of the story. The film lurches forward, tries to right the course, and then loses all sense of fun and mystery as it goes through the motions of a bog standard story.

The mystery itself isn’t hard to figure out, largely because the movie fails to introduce enough real, substantive characters who could end up being the villain. We really only spend time with Greer, Peters, and the creator of the surrogates, Dr. Lionel Canter (Cromwell), and since no one else gets any development (spoilers) it’s obvious that Canter has to be the villain. What isn’t obvious is why, especially because the film opens with the death of his son, Jarod Canter (Shane Dzicek), when the surrogate he borrowed (with permission) from his father is one of the first to get fried.

As it’s eventually revealed, Canter wants to get rid of the very tech he created as its purpose, in his eyes, has been perverted. He meant it to be used for the disabled, but now everyone uses it, and it’s become a crutch for humanity. The first shot with the weapon was a test to see how it worked, and once he was sure it could work he planned to use it to fry all the surrogates at once, killing billions to save the rest of humanity. It’s a proper evil villain plan, and you kind of see his perspective of it, except that none of the clues actually work to point to Canter.

Remember, his son was the first to die and he seemed legitimately upset over it. Except, with the way the opening is set up he either knew that his son was going to be the first victim, meaning his son’s death was planned all along, or the weapon was supposed to be used on the elder Canter… except if that’s the case, then Canter wouldn’t be alive to then use the tech on the rest of the surrogates in circulation.

If his son was the target, which doesn’t make a ton of sense, it also acts as the only reason why the FBI narrowed in on Canter at all. Yes, they would have investigated any murders caused by this surrogate-frying tech, but Canter’s own son was one of the victims, so they immediately go to Canter to ask questions. If his son hadn’t died, they never would have come to him, or had him as a suspect, or been keeping an eye on him at all. He basically causes his own problem for no reason at all.

And if the goal is to fry all surrogates, this tech doesn’t really do anything. The tech only fries the surrogates online, and while it seems like all surrogates are connected to a single corporate network (which is a stupid idea from a tech security perspective) that wouldn’t do anything to the surrogates that are offline, which are plentiful. Even frying all the surrogates on the network would only cause a temporary problem before people go out and buy new ones to replace the old ones. At best he would have bought a week of no surrogates and then life would go back to normal. He would accomplish nothing.

Not that you really care about all of this while watching the film. No one involved in this movie really seems to care as everyone is going through the motions. Willis is in practically every scene but rarely does he rouse himself from a paycheck-collecting stupor to actually engage with the material, and he’s still the best performer in this film. They all knew they were making a stinker, but when you can show up, run around for a bit, and get your paper, why not do that? I can’t fault the actors for being here, but I can fault Touchstone (and all its associated production partners) for pushing this film out in this state.

Surrogates is a bad movie, made worse by the fact that the comic it was based on was actually pretty decent. There’s a solid kernel of an idea here that could make a perfectly solid Hollywood adaptation, but this 2009 film is not it. It’s bland, boring, and incredibly dumb, all factors that not only sunk it at the Box Office but basically ruin it for anyone going back to see what they missed. Surrogates is a dud, through and through.