There’s no substitute for good film-making

I saw The Surrogates yesterday, and I really wanted to like it. The premise is interesting: what would happen if everybody in the world could use an idealized representation of him or herself to interact with others? Also, the awesome Rosamund Pike (who will forever be for me Jane Bennett) somehow agreed to be in it, which I thought spoke highly of the film. I forgot, though, that even serious actors need to eat.

Anyway, It seemed like this could be a good movie. The rating at Rotten Tomatoes was 37%, but I don’t ALWAYS agree with the reviewers there. Elizabeth Banks and her husband, Max Handelman, who, based on nothing but their twitter feeds, seem like cool people, produced this movie, so I hoped it would be awesome.

It was not. Seriously. If I had a surrogate, I would have used it to see this movie, so that when I started to bang my head on the wall immediately upon exiting the theater, I would have suffered no lasting effects. The more you think about this movie, the less it makes sense. The intro laughingly suggests that such technology would cure communicable diseases and racism immediately. Riiiight. So because you don’t know whether the black surrogate you’re talking to is actually a black person, you suddenly begin to love black people, because they secretly might be white? Doubtful. How can EVERYBODY afford a surrogate? What happens to the poor people who can’t? If surrogates need to charge, what are the operators doing in that time. Does nobody go out at all? What happened to all the gyms? How can people have medication, if they don’t go out? The surrogates can’t be checked for conditions, so what gives? Are doctors now making house calls? And the big one – SPOILER – Why does one measly control station somewhere in the US have access to the surrogate network for the entire world? WHO THOUGHT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA????

A relevant review from Rotten Tomatoes:

The script is by the team that gave us “Catwoman” and the last two “Terminator” movies, which tells you all you need to know. The direction is by Jonathan Mostow, who did a couple of good genre movies early on, and then went off the rails with “Terminator 3.”

“Surrogates” continues the slide. — Stephen Whitty, Newark Star Ledger (full review)

Also, when I checked this morning, the movie was down to 35% fresh. Exactly.