BEVERLY HILLS, California — It's already been a smash comic book, and we've been following its development into a movie for quite some time. Now, the Bruce Willis sci-fi flick "Surrogates" is finally hitting theaters this weekend, fueled by one very provocative question: If you had a robot doppelgдnger to live life for you, what would you do with it?
"My surrogate would be fighting fires and saving the world," said Radha Mitchell, one of the stars of the film. "The surrogate could also be doing all that menial stuff. My surrogate would be doing everything. I could just relax and get a massage instead."
"I'd send him down to Washington, tell him to fire all the politicians and start looking for that $780 billion they can't seem to find," grinned Willis, who plays the futuristic cop investigating a series of murders in a world where people stay indoors, resting while their robots do all the living for them. "It'd be a good day."
For the sake of drama, "Surrogates" revolves around a whodunit plot line that has Willis' Greer and Mitchell's Peters investigating homicides in a supposedly "safe" world. But in reality, the idea of long-distance living doesn't seem so impossible at a time when we can buy anything online, make friends we'll never meet on Facebook and live vicariously through avatars in Second Life, "The Sims" and countless other gaming options.
"A thousand years from now, historians will look on this time period right now that we're living through, and they will look at it as this major sea change in the way that people lived their lives, and what civilization went through — both on an individual, psychological basis and also on a collective, societal basis," insisted "U-571" filmmaker Jonathan Mostow, the director of the film. "In the same way we look at tens of thousands of years ago, when humans invented fire and how that profoundly changed their lives — but they probably didn't realize it at the time. They just thought, 'Oh, cool, I don't have to eat raw meat!' "
"We don't know [how all this new technology will change our lives] either; we're all guessing at it in the dark," he continued, explaining that his film's depiction of a world in which humans sit in comfy recliner chairs while their surrogates engage in dangerous thrill-seeking activities, have reckless sexual encounters and go to work for them while sending back the experiences via virtual reality is just one take on where all this could lead. "I love that that stuff. I love e-mail, I love the Internet, but I also know that the hours a day that I spend doing that, I used to spend doing something else. I don't remember what I used to do with it — but I did something with it."
And although it may have some possibly dangerous ramifications, some people will undoubtedly go see "Surrogates" this weekend and look at its futuristic world as a beautiful possibility. "That's the whole point: You can avoid experiences that you don't want to have and enhance experiences that you do want to have, just by getting into this body that's better than you, better-looking than you and feels better than you do. If you're old, you'll feel young," Mitchell said. "However you want to feel, you can feel."
Check out everything we've got on "Surrogates."
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