Surrogates – DVD Review
There are many reasons to add Surrogates to your DVD collection. Among them are: you’re a Bruce Willis completeist, you like a good film noir and sci-fi doesn’t turn you off, you’re an all-the-humans-are-robots-except-for-the-protagonist-completeist, or, perhaps, you just like science fiction thrillers. Surrogates qualifies for all those reasons. Even though this isn’t a one of those sci-fi movies based off a Philip K Dick short story, it does deal with a lot of the themes in Philip K Dick’s writings.
Surrogates is based off a graphic novel by first time author Robert Venditti and it struggled to find an audience when it was in the theaters. It had a big name star, a unique premise, and a great director. Jonathon Mostow directed the bit hit Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, so I think everyone expected Surrogates to follow in that vein.
So why didn’t it work? Well, I think the premise may have been a bit too out there for most of the public and, to be honest, the film loses its way a bit about two-thirds through. It’s still a great film. Just not as good as it could have been.
What did work was the Director’s vision for how the story would be told. It’s film noir and a lot of great techniques from the 60s era of film noir are used. Where the film goes off track is when they get away from that style of film and slip into the action thrill. It’s almost as if you can feel the studio executives complaining that there aren’t enough explosions and gun fights.
Surrogates will hit stores on January 26th, but you can pre-order it now on Amazon.
Lots of great factoids below the cut:
