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hestia8(this was supposed to be a quick rant for delgaserasca but then aaaaargh it got long)
So, in The Future, some dude has invented classy robots that can look however you want and go out do things for you with no risk (they’re very sturdy and if the surrogate gets hurt, you don’t). You stay safely in a chair thing in your home. Within 10 years or whatever, 99% of people use Surrogates in everyday life and humans who don’t want to be robots tend to live on reservations (they call them that) in the big cities. They have a guru (Ving Rhames) who talks/broadcasts a lot about being real humans and stuff. GUESS THE TWIST.
As a result of widespread surrogacy, discrimination has fallen and violent crime has virtually disappeared. Then one day some dude turns up with a weapon that can kill the Surrogate and overload the failsafes to kill the human as well. It just so happens that the first time he uses it, he kills the son of the dude who invented Surrogates. This is mistaken identity as the son was using one of his father’s Surrogates.
Bruce Willis (who looks hilarious as a surrogate) and Radha Mitchell are the cops investigating, and basically it turns into a massive conspiracy where someone wants to kill the dude who invented Surrogates and it’s to do with the company he created and how they’re pissed off because he now hates what he created blah blah, and there’s an odd subplot where the police chief is the one who’d had the job of giving the weapon to the dude, and I couldn’t work out WHY (to give Boris Kodjoe something to do? BUT it had happened offscreen, I don’t understaaaaaaand), and then in the end it turned out Inventor Man had created a horrible virus to kill all the Surrogates and people using them, and Bruce Willis manages to stop the virus killing the people but decides to let it go ahead and kill the surrogates so we all have to be human again, the end.
Problems with the world building:
> the take-up of the robots was soooooo quick (so that the inventor could be a living character, I think). There’s no way 99% of the US population would have them in < 10 years. The economics of it just don’t make any sense or the practicalities (what are the base materials? Where are they coming from?). You must have to buy them (VSI is a big corporation), but unless they’re super-cheap, people on low incomes aren’t going to add a payment plan for a Surrogate on top of their other bills.
> the Surrogates are super strong/fast/can jump super high etc (possibly this could just be police/army ones, as mods were available) but people were just using them for everyday life.
> I don’t understand why discrimination would disappear? There were a lot of examples of people not looking the same as their Surrogate (when BW went into the station as him, it was noted as odd how much he looked like his Surrogate), but why that would stop people being racist/sexist/whatever, idk. And it wouldn’t *stop* discrimination, it would just mean that you wouldn’t know the person you were talking to was black/disabled/a woman etc etc.
> Inventor Man blahhed on about humanity and the things we’ve lost all being human, blah blah, but he was a) happy to kill individuals (pretty sure it was him some of the time) and b) was later planning a massive virus to kill around a billion people (painfully).
> I just didn’t buy that everyone would get a Surrogate so quickly when the world seemed basically to be like it is now – maybe if there’d been some toxic environmental thing so people had to stay in their homes, or some massive monster invasion or something
> at the end when all the Surrogates had died, we heard a bunch of newsreader reports, but the newsreaders were all Surrogates too! So were the technicians/camera operators/everyone working at any given TV station! WHO WAS TALKING? HOW WAS IT BEING RECORDED? HOW WAS IT BEING BROADCAST?
> I’ve not even touched on the marital angst Bruce Willis and Rosamund Pike were having (their son died and she’d been injured before Surrogacy, so she’d retreated in to her Surrogate and he just angsted in a very Bruce Willis way), although from a TV advert it seems like Surrogates for Kids was a new thing (otherwise why advertise when you’ve already got a 99% market share?), in which case WTF have the kids been doing up until now?
