Directed by:
Jonathan MostowCinematography:
Oliver WoodComposer:
Richard MarvinCast:
Bruce Willis, Rosamund Pike, Radha Mitchell, Ving Rhames, Valerie Azlynn, James Cromwell, Boris Kodjoe, Michael Cudlitz, Jack Noseworthy, Helena Mattsson (more)Plots(1)
In the not-so-distant future, where people experience life through perfect surrogates controlled from the safety of their own homes, murder is a thing of the past. But when a college student linked to the creator of these replicants is killed, one FBI agent must re-enter reality and risk his life to unravel the mystery. In the battle of technology versus humanity, who can you trust? Experience every electrifying moment of this mind-blowing movie. Based on the acclaimed graphic novel. (Walt Disney US)
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Reviews (9)
A proper fiasco. Bruce Willis is clearly bored and wasting his time on unsuccessful and rip-off sci-fi flicks. Jonathan Mostow completely failed, Rosamund Pike’s breasts are three sizes larger than her standard, which sticks out like a sore thumb on Surrogates, and overall, this colourful and non-contact fairy tale is just golden tinsel that hardly earned its keep. I recommend avoiding it completely.
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Definitely above average. Neither Bruce Willis nor Jonathan Mostow disappointed and they made a quality summer spectacle, but it didn't hit the movie theaters until the autumn. Oh well. The film went by pleasantly fast, 90 minutes felt like nothing, it hardly lost momentum and everything in it was clear and nice to look at. I have no reservations about the action scenes and effects, or the actors and actresses. Don't expect philosophy, don't expect "another Matrix or I, Robot", expect fun with a bit of thought put into it.
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I remembered the film from 2009 as pretty good sci-fi fun, so I wanted to recall it years later. Surrogates is a good movie, it just has trouble crossing over into the "better" movie category. Jonathan Mostow unfortunately isn't that experienced a director and didn’t have to climb the filmmaking ranks of other big names, and that's probably where the whole result stems from. For the kind of material he's working with here, he doesn’t the potential to its fullest, the concept of surrogates and the sci-fi world is so broad that it could have been worked into at least a two-hour feature or better yet a series; 85 minutes is definitely not enough to do that, it feels very abbreviated and straightforward, which on the one hand makes the film move quickly and doesn't get boring, but on the other hand it offers a feeling of incompleteness. That said, as an average action film for an undemanding viewer it works fine.
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If Mostow has been considered a solid craftsman up to now, he will now be considered a desperate routinist... and a thief to boot. As long as it still follows the popcorn rules à la I, Robot, we can enjoy the slightly B-movie atmosphere, which is carried by Willis's cynical smile and funny toupee. Then we get some mentoring according to Issac Asimov and Phillip K. Dick in the visual diction of Terminator 3 and everything goes to hell. It wouldn't have had to be this way if someone had bothered to add some extra runtime, given the characters some life, and if the film had at least one memorable scene. The result is the most ridiculous blockbuster of the year, which I predict will become a cult film in a few years and a must-have in the "guilty pleasure" collectors' kit.
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Surrogates is to some extent a B- movie with a grade-A budget. It is based on an interesting idea that aptly allegorizes the artificiality of contemporary peroxide-and-shopping culture. However, it needed a more ambitious screenwriter who would write something more than an action-packed forgettable flick made marketable thanks to Bruce Willis. In the film, we find motifs familiar from Children of Men (“dreadlocked guys” on the margins of society) and the attractive high-tech visuals of I, Robot, and it wants to be deadly serious like Spielberg’s Minority Report. However, unlike those movies, Surrogates does not dare to take a single step in its own direction and prefers to work with proven twists, tries to look clever by being unnecessarily contrived and at least in one (the final) scene, it is even ridiculous due to the futility of its screenplay. The character of the dreadlocked “Prophet”, played by Ving Rhames, is not well executed; Willis himself is alright as the only link between the viewer and the real world of living people, but unfortunately without any cool lines or humor, which could have provided some needed comic relief.
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Photo © Walt Disney Studios
![Surrogates - Promo](http://image.pmgstatic.com/cache/resized/w663/files/images/film/photos/164/099/164099913_20d43b.jpg)
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