Director
Jonathan Mostow's Surrogates, based on the Top Shelf Productions comic by
Robert Venditti and
Brett Weldele, has all the requisite components of a
Bruce Willis sci-fi/action movie--guns, robots, explosions--but Mostow hopes that the audience looks deeper, into the message behind the mayhem.
"My question before we ever screened Surrogates for test audiences. Are people going to get what we’re talking about here? Or are they just going to enjoy the chases and explosions? It was great to find out that, even though it plays like a mystery, suspense action movie, all the focus groups wanted to talk about was the social commentary. I’ve never seen that happen before."
In the near-future world of the movie, people use idealized versions of themselves to interact with others, much in the way some use false identities on the internet today. But
Surrogates takes it one step further in that human consciousnesses are capable of entering and powering human-looking androids to go out and experience the world.
"I guess you could call it a robot movie and there have been a thousand of those. But I think this one is different. It just seemed to fit closely with how we live our lives today. What Surrogates is all about is how people retain their humanity in the face of relentless technology. I got that instantly from reading the script. It’s about how people are tethered to their electronic devices such as mobile phones, Blackberrys, etc; how they do their shopping on the net; how you’re not talking to a person you’re talking to a piece of software when you call the customer service line."
But, if you're worried that the film will be short on action and long on social commentary, Mostow says that there will be plenty of thrills.
"This is not a bubble-gum movie. It’s definitely got the stuff you’d expect from a Bruce Willis, sci-fi – action film. But it takes the subject matter seriously. There’s nothing frivolous about it.
Surrogates is in theaters now!