Venue: Cine 2 Ster-Kinekor, Maerua Mall
Film: SURROGATES
Director: Jonathan Mostow
Screenplay: John Brancato and Michael Ferris
Players: Bruce Willis Rhoda Mitchell; Rosamund Pike; Michael Ferris
Genre: Science Fiction; adventure; thriller; detective

Stephen Spielberg completed a film for Stanley Kubrick: A.I., Artificial Intelligence: it was clever but long and self-indulgent. This film treats the same theme: the idea that humans can order humanoid equivalents to fill a missing part of real life. The irony in the Kubrick film was that human emotion, particularly the ultimate - the ability to love - was reproduced perfectly by the humanoid; the human race was boorish and inconsistent by comparison. In this film, the reality between human and the artificial counterpart becomes blurred - to the extent that the robots do more of the reality of living than their ‘organisers’, the humans who purchased them.
The film starts with a clever premise: over a period of 8 years, a private company called VSI has cornered the global market in humanoid replacements, or ‘surrogates’: those people with the financial wherewithal (90% we are told) can purchase a robotic replacement to do the daily grind of living while the human ‘rests’ and mentally dictates the actions and behavior of the robotic counterpart. The creator of the ‘surrogate’, Doctor Lionel Canter, builds VSI, his company, into a powerful global business operation which has ventured into weaponry of a particularly deadly kind.
As with the South African film, District 9, acceptance and welcome of ‘surrogates’ has, over an 8-year period, deteriorated into resentment and opposition, in the same way that South Africans first welcomed and then resented the aliens: in fact, in this film the lower classes of humans are now referred to derogatorily as ‘dreads’, and they are relegated to a shanty-style ghetto, which is run autocratically by an African-American known as The Prophet, who spits out political propaganda against the whole concept of surrogates. His death reveals the reality of his own origins. This sci-fi film is driven under the guise of a detective story, as two ‘surrogate’ detectives, Agents Jennifer Peters (Mitchell) and Tom Gevers (Willis) are called to investigate the death of Canter’s son, who rejects his father’s choice of an evening at the opera in favor of a rave club: he is gunned down by a mysterious motor cyclist in an alley behind the club. The viewer must bear in mind that the surrogate detectives will not do anything that their human counterparts do not countenance. They are basically physical puppets for anemic, grizzled humans who prefer to lie prostrate in “slim chairs’ while their minds dictate actions to their robotic counterparts. A point about human vanity is stressed, as the robots may be physically attractive and youthful while their human mentors are graying, wrinkled and inert. After 8 years, the humans are actually fearful of ‘real life’, preferring to remain prostrate, literally.
The only humans in the films (an indictment, as with District 9), are physically overweight, greasy, and physically unattractive. They have lost the will to live, in the truest sense of the word. The exemplum is Saunders, the computer geek who is completely human and in charge of the entire VSI operation; only he knows every operative (euphemism for ‘human’) and his or her robotic counterpart, or ‘surrogate’. Dr Canter, to confuse the plot, has at least 6 different surrogates and appears to be omnipotent, as each guise makes him even more elusive.
Half the complexity of plot derives from the viewer’s initiative in distinguishing the humans from the robots, or surrogates.  Two thin plotlines attempt to sustain the action: Gever’s wife has never recovered from the death of their son in a car accident: she has remained prostrate on a ‘slim’ machine, sustained by tranquilisers ever since. Tom lives with the robotic equivalent: a plastic and artificial beauty whose job involves renovating other surrogates for their operatives. The other plotline involves Dr Canter, creator of the surrogates, who was thrown out of his own company, VSI, some years before the main action of the film, and whose son is killed. Who killed his son? One argument twists circumstance to argue that Canter himself was ultimately responsible. VSI advertising promotes the notion of, “Do what you want; be what you want.” The settings disport surrogates being recharged in a public street in structures like telephone booths, advertised as ‘Quik Volt’; surrogates are placed in glass cases outside lifts of public buildings and are available in retail shops – choose your own physiognomy because none of them is overweight or ugly. Japanese robot companies have already introduced their first humanoid to the world: Asimo. He looks rather like R2D2 from the Star Wars Trilogy and the South Korean government has promised every family an Asimo domestic assistant at government expense by 2020. That’s not too far away. This film sends the same message as Spielberg’s A.I. and Dr Steve Jones, a British computer academic: that by 2030 computers and robots will have outstripped us and outmaneuvered us: this film stresses human anxiety as a consequence of avoiding real life; Jones goes much further – that ignorance and the global lack of monitoring of private research and development of robotics will ultimately be our ruin