Surrogates: Starring Bruce Willis, Rhada Mitchell, James Cromwell and Ving Rhames

At no disrespect to the filmmakers and cast of Surrogates, including Jonathan Mostow, Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, James Cromwell and Ving Rhames; it is a cinematic ball of irony. Surrogates is the adaptation of Robert Venditti's comic series about a dystopian near-future where humanity plugs into life-like robots to fulfill their superficial and subconscious desires. Though, it is not just a new global pastime and it has become a way of life where civilization has split into two camps; robots (Surrogates) and meat-bags (real humans).

While the overriding message of Surrogates is evident in the print form of Venditti's comics, the film adaptation takes on an ironic presence. We take away a warning about the human obsession with youth and beauty from the story, where the plastic glam-orgy of perfect hair and skin is at conflict with the saggy eyed scar face of Bruce Willis. Essentially when we take this message from the medium of film we enter an ironic grey-area where Hollywood propagates a plastic glam-orgy of its own.

Where Surrogates, the movie, succeeds over the comic series is in capturing the perfect world of robots built to look good, like glossy holograms of the advertising models. Venditti's comic series came to life in the raw and gritty illustrations of Brett Weldele. Only Hollywood can polish this dystopia so that FBI agents, played by Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell, look like a Barbie and Ken version of Mulder and Scully from the X-Files.

Of course Agent Barbie and Ken are the Surrogates of Willis and Mitchell's characters, who sit at home with the rest of civilization as remote operators. Visually the film achieves the message that the effects of aging and the battle scars of life are perhaps more beautiful than a perfume soaked perm atop perfect plastic skin. As we see the contrast of the humans' Surrogates with their own wrinkled, pot-bellied and baggy eyed withering bodies, it is a welcome relief from the plastic world of perfection.

Is this a sign that Hollywood is changing its cultural perspective that youth and beauty are the epitome of existence here on Earth? Can we sit bold and beautiful on our own, outside the strict confines Hollywood's A-list expectations? Perhaps that is better asked of the executives at Touchstone Pictures, who distributed Surrogates. Touchstone is of course a holding of the Walt Disney Company, which also owns ESPN, Miramax Films and ABC Television, all companies that have a vested interest in keeping America fixated on the young and gorgeous. This is not to say that the Walt Disney Corporation is hell-bent on global domination through mind-numbing marketing tactics propagating superficial beauty; not at all.

If that were true, studio executives at Disney wouldn't let a message motivated film like Surrogates slip through, nor would it air shows like Ugly Betty on prime-time. Even still, the message's irony exists in multiple examples under the Disney Umbrella such as Desperate Housewives, Lost, Grey's Anatomy, Dancing with the Stars, All My Children, General Hospital, Lizzie McGuire, Hannah Montana, High School Musical, or the endless parade of glamorous people who grace the screen in Touchstone and Miramax films.

Surrogates is just one of several contradictions that co-exist within an empire like Disney. Unattainable beauty is put on a pedestal under the Disney Umbrella, among the other media giants, yet this presence mingles with the message that we are all beautiful on the inside. In this comfy grey-area, Disney's influence balances its glorification of glamour with a message of self-empowerment. Yet, in reality society doesn't practice this balance and continues its obsessive perusal of riches, fame and youth.

Sociological rants aside, Surrogates seems to fall a little short in the character development department too. Bruce Willis's character, FBI agent Tom Greer, stumbles along a crime investigation that unravels his living nightmare within a world of surrogates. He is evidently at odds with the world around him, struggling to re-inhabit his own body and not live vicariously through his surrogate. Bruce Willis is no stranger to being the unlikely sci-fi hero, laying groundwork in films like Twelve Monkeys, The Fifth Element, and Armageddon. Yet, Willis's portrayal of agent Greer in Surrogates leaves him with a character even lucky to be left alive. This is the man we've come to know, as Bruce Willis is continually beaten to within inches of his life, but always makes the right move at the critical moment.

(Warning: Plot Spoilers)

Unfortunately we make this association to the actor Bruce Willis and not to the character he plays in Surrogates. Agent Greer is hardly given the motivational set-up to save the world outside a bit of empathy, a touch of apathy for the world around him and a largely understated loyalty to law enforcement. Another greatly understated role in Surrogates is James Cromwell's masterfully complex Dr. Lionel Canter, the inventor of surrogates who rebels against the very world he created. This tormented soul loses his only son, hence Greer's empathy having lost his only son as well, and goes haywire cracking the case for Greer while single-handedly firing up a meat-bag revolution.

The character of Dr. Canter is such a tremendous undertaking that Cromwell cannot do it only. Dr. Canter takes on many forms within his Surrogate world, notably played further by Radha Mitchell and the much underused Ving Rhames. Sadly, while Ving Rhames and Bruce Willis are reunited from Pulp Fiction in Surrogates, nobody goes medieval. Their screen time together is limited, but fittingly Rhames's character, The Prophet, has his thugs give Willis a thorough beat down.

With such a grotesque dystopia being explored by a powerhouse of acting in Willis, Mitchell, Cromwell and Rhames, one should expect much more from Surrogates. The film's director, Jonathan Mostow, is a filmmaker gifted in choosing material, but troubled in its execution. Mostow acquired the thriller classic, The Game, but luckily in was left in the hands of David Fincher to direct with Mostow producing. Mostow then helmed the ship for the historical adventure U-571, a masterstroke in material, but sunk his ship with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. So Mostow didn't learn his lesson and revert to history for direction, instead going back to the future with Surrogates. While the film is admirable and engaging, it is much like a surrogate of the real thing. Venditti's comic has been stripped of its flesh and bone and molded into a piece of Hollywood plastic.