Based on the comic series of the same name, Surrogates delivers a thriller wrapped in an action movie packaging that will keep you locked in your seat for its short, yet sweet duration. The Blu-ray release feels like a similar treat, offering a very small amount of awesome special features packed in with great video and sound quality. Fans of the original comic series as well as fans of sci-fi films in general should pick this one up.
 

Overview

This film is set in a future society where most people remain in their homes and live out their lives and fantasies through robotic surrogates.  When the son of the original surrogate’s creator is found murdered, FBI agents Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) and his partner Jennifer Peters (Radha Mitchell) are sent to track down the killer.   They soon discover that the suspect uses a weapon that can destroy a surrogate and also kill the operator.  Greer must risk his life by abandoning his surrogate in order to unearth a conspiracy that could potentially upset the balance of society’s perfect utopia.

Highlights

Surrogates is a smart film.  It mixes suspense and action in a way that will keep the average viewer happy while also delivering strong underlying themes of addiction and the loss of human connection. It also borders society’s current infatuation with thinness and beauty and takes it to an extreme that is scary and eye opening. Seeing most of the characters true versions of themselves also provides a solid reason this type of society, if existed, would be very sad indeed.

Bruce Willis was great in this film. He continues to perform exceptionally well in the roles he has taken recently and doesn’t seem to have aged as much as the last generation of action stars has. With that said, I generally look forward to seeing the films he’s attached to. His gruff demeanor works really well against those that reject him for not using a surrogate and he brings plenty of emotion to the film as Tom Greer.  The scenes with him and his wife Maggie (Rosamund Pike) are particularly intense. He also does his own stunt work in the film which was awesome and surprising.   

Special Features

Surrogates comes as a single disc package with the full length feature along with an audio commentary track with director Jonathan Mostow, Breaking The Frame featurette, A More Perfect You featurette, deleted scenes, and the music video for “I Will Not Bow” by Breaking Benjamin.  The “A More Perfect You” featurette is the best of the features and runs about 15 minutes. It is a mixture of a behind the scenes feature and a documentary on the state of the robotics industry.  It provides details on how close humanity is to actually having robot surrogates and shows off some amazing technology that’s being developed and used today.

The “Breaking The Frame: a Graphic Novel Comes to Life” featurette has the screenplay writers Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato talking about how they created the screenplay from the "graphic novel" (actually a comic series also collected in trade paperback form).  It runs about six and a half minutes and is far too short for the amount of material tackled in the original series. The audio commentary is pretty standard, but director Jonathan Mostow’s voice is a bit too monotone for my tastes and the track became very boring as the film went on. Most of the deleted scenes are finished and add some additional info that I would have liked to see as part of the main feature,  especially the “What You’re Looking At” scene.  The addition of the music video was a nice touch, more so because I’m a fan of Breaking Benjamin, but it was nice nonetheless.

Overall

Surrogates is a great film that successfully blends action and suspense with a theme that tackles some much larger issues seen in our own society.  Bruce Willis does another great job here and it’s nice to see an action star of his caliber remain as bad ass as his John McClane persona was 22 years ago. The number of special features is light for a movie that tackles such a unique idea.  I would have liked more behind the scenes features on how the concept was originally created for the graphic novel and how it was then transferred to the big screen, but what’s there is worth watching.

ComicsOnline give Surrogates on Blu-ray 4 out of 5 consumer robots.

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