So, instead of doing something productive today, I decided my time would be better spent microwaving two full plates of bean-covered nachos (which were delicious, thanks for asking), playing video games in wool socks and boxers, and watching whatever mindless crap looked semi-interesting on Netflix. For whatever reason, I decided that today would be...an
action movie day. Maybe it was the lingering bloodlust from so many hours of Call of Duty death matches. I don't know. I'm not a doctor.
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| Yeah, that. I want that. |
But, in any case, I needed to satiate my yearning for remorseless property destruction, paper-thin characters, and dialogue that leads to spontaneous tumor growth. While
Ballistics: Ecks vs. Sever and
Snake Island sounded profound and meaningful in their own way, I settled on something more mainstream and high-concept.
Surrogates. I never expected myself to actually sit down and watch this movie. The idea always sounded pretty cool: a future utopia where every man, woman, and child is safely plugged into an indestructible robot vessel from the comfort of their own homes.
But while the concept sounded good, the previews made it look like a mix between
The Matrix and the inside of a tanning booth...directed by Ed Hardy...tripping balls on acid.
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| The toilet of the future! |
(Spoilers Ahoy!)
As the introductory montage of news flashes so thoroughly explains, the invention of these "surrogates" (hey, that's the movie title!) have amazingly eradicated all issues related to crime, poverty, and racial prejudice. In this perfect society, everyone can conform to unrealistic social expectations! Are you an independent woman with unsightly imperfections? An African-American who isn't athletic? Or an obese person of no productive value to society? In a world of surrogates, these horrifying inadequacies are no longer relevant.
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| In real life, she has unsightly bed sores...and he's kind of old! Disgusting... |
Still, not everyone is happy. Namely, religious people. Why? Well, I'm not entirely sure/wasn't really paying attention. But I think it has something to do with the fact that every surrogate looks unbelievably gay. Like velour track pants and "I own every season of
The Bad Girl's Club on DVD" gay.
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| "The only real crime here is this dead guy's frosted tips...Yucky!!!" |
In any case, the radical leader of the luddite Christians (who live in a nostalgic and heart-rending sanctuary filled with bountiful gardens, little boys playing baseball, and men riding tractors in the streets...no, seriously) somehow gets his hands on a super-powerful weapon that can kill any surrogate host with the push of a button. How, you ask? Well, once fired, the weapon sends a software virus in the form of a bolt of blue lightning into the surrogate's eyeballs, causing them to explode. The software virus is then transferred wirelessly over several miles to the host's CPU. After breaking through a series of gateways and firewalls (it's all a bit complicated and technical), the virus causes the host's brain to explode, too! Yeah.
Technology.
Lots of stuff happens in the middle. People jumping on cars and shit. Oh, and the cult leader turns out to be a robot. In the end, as with most great action films, the real villain turns out to be the most dangerous psychopath of all...the academic in a wheelchair!
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| You miserable monster... |
For some reason, the inventor of surrogate technology decides he messed up by tampering with conventional standards of human socialization (take
that tangy whiff of social commentary, Mark Zuckerberg). So, in order to set things right with the world, he decides to pose as a religious fundamentalist revolutionary, kill his own son for the sake of a "greater good", and murder over one billion people with some sort of global lightning virus uploaded through the FBI central computer (whatever the hell that is).
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| Da fuuuuuuu...? |
Ultimately, he fails. A fat guy with sideburns figures out some sort of hack-proof password that overrides the upload with literally one second remaining in the countdown. Proving once and for all that slovenly desk jockeys are the last, great hope for humanity's continued survival. The fat guy's heroic witticism in this moment of triumph? "We just saved about a billion lives there." Truly groundbreaking stuff.
My final verdict: Two Exploding Craniums out of Five.
