SYNOPSIS: People are living their lives remotely from the safety of their own homes via robotic surrogates—sexy, physically perfect mechanical representations of themselves. It’s an ideal world where crime, pain, fear and consequences don’t exist. When the first murder in years jolts this utopia, FBI agent Greer (BRUCE WILLIS) discovers a vast conspiracy behind the surrogate phenomenon and must abandon his own surrogate, risking his life to unravel the mystery.

REVIEW: How many man vs. machine movies have there been? Well if you’ve enjoyed them all like I have, you won’t mind this latest version. It has similarities with a lot of it’s predecessors but it has a different twist. You will be reminded of the Terminator and Matrix series, I, Robot, The Island, and even Wall-E to name a few. In this case human beings voluntarily replace themselves with robots (surrogates) that are made to be as close to human as possible and designed to look according to its operator’s specifications. The operators (the actual human beings) live through the surrogates by connecting to them in a complete virtual reality manner. This leaves the operators to just remain at home in a physical vegetable state while these robot representations go out into the world to physically live out the lives of the operators. This presents much controversy both in the movie and in reality as well I’m sure. Is humanity reaching this point of almost complete isolation? Has society become so perverse and degraded that we would rather not participate directly but through a machine? This movie demonstrates the ultimate artificial existence, complete inhumanity if you know what I mean. As a society we seem to have less and less face to face contact with one another. Cell phones, text messages, voice mails, and emails have taken the place of eye to eye contact. Are we becoming more desensitized to one another? Is this movie that far fetched? You’ve got to admit that some modern movies are quite imaginative and thought provoking.

Ok, enough preaching. This movie was good but I thought it was going to be a little better. It is not an edge of your seat action packed thriller throughout although there are some edge of your seat action packed moments, no doubt. There is some scattered drama and plenty of statements trying to be made about society in general. Probably what puzzled me the most about this film is Bruce Willis’ performance. This is Bruce Willis, a blockbuster kind of guy who can single handedly carry a movie. Well he just didn’t seem himself in this picture especially as a surrogate. Oh yeah, duh, that because it’s his surrogate. No but seriously, even when you see him as the actual human being, he didn’t seem his usual self in movies. In other words, he didn’t carry the movie as strongly as he usually does. Maybe the character called for him to be that way . . . hmmm. The whole cast in general did not have very sharp performances. A contributing factor is that the script was not that sharp either. One thing that was special was the way the cast behaved ever so slightly and subtly like robots when shown as the surrogates. Their movements, speech, facial expressions, etc. were all well done because it wasn’t exaggerated or overly obvious. The makeup jobs were impressive too. The special effects were very good, not the best I’ve ever seen, but good. I must tell you though that the climax for this movie was pretty exciting. It shouldn’t be too surprising that the director of Terminator 3, Jonathan Mostow, also directed this film . . . and the picture becomes a little more clear. Even though I gave a lot of negativity, the movie is good and since there isn’t a whole lot to choose from at the theater nowadays, it is not a bad choice to go see.