September 27, 2009
A pleasingly intelligent contribution to the Evil Corporate Conspiracy/Techno-Sci-Fi genre, which owes much to those that have gone before it - most notably to I, Robot (with which it also shares the ever-excellent James Cromwell), Minority Report, The Matrix, and inevitably Blade Runner. The premise, in case you've never read the source-comic or seen the trailer, is that in this future, only poor people need to appear in public as their imperfect selves - everyone who can afford to spends their days in their pyjamas lying on a couch hooked up to their surrogate self - a slimmer, fitter, younger, more glamorous robot version of themselves, through whose eyes they can see and through whose mouths they can speak and conduct their business and personal lives.
The flies in the ointment are three-fold. One is that some unkind person has invented a weapon which can simultaneously explode the head of the surrogate and melt the brain of the operator. Another is that some people, like our hero Bruce Willis, would rather have a real relationship with their real wife dealing with real problems, and are fed-up with their plastic-coated ever-youthful surrogates. The third is the very evident social inequity of the situation, which has led a large group of refuseniks to found their own colony where they raise food and live lives the old-fashioned way, without the benefit of technology.
The plot is by no means startlingly original, but it generates some pretty awesome scenes and some witty, if rather sexist, observations on human nature - supposing for example that if every woman could look like a movie star, she would choose to do so, and that when you think nobody is ever going to see the real you, your personal hygiene kinda slips. Amusingly, the real Bruce looks way (WAY) more attractive than his orange-hued surrogate, with all wrinkles air-brushed out and a nice blond wig sat on top.
Willis has almost cornered the market in the role of one-guy-against-the-system, appearing in his natural cynicism and self-reliance the natural inheritor of Humphrey Bogart, and like Bogart he is becoming more attractive as he ages (he is now 54). Interestingly our own dear Rosamund Pike pops up with a reasonably convincing American accent as his fragile and increasingly remote wife.
Definitely worth a look.
The flies in the ointment are three-fold. One is that some unkind person has invented a weapon which can simultaneously explode the head of the surrogate and melt the brain of the operator. Another is that some people, like our hero Bruce Willis, would rather have a real relationship with their real wife dealing with real problems, and are fed-up with their plastic-coated ever-youthful surrogates. The third is the very evident social inequity of the situation, which has led a large group of refuseniks to found their own colony where they raise food and live lives the old-fashioned way, without the benefit of technology.
The plot is by no means startlingly original, but it generates some pretty awesome scenes and some witty, if rather sexist, observations on human nature - supposing for example that if every woman could look like a movie star, she would choose to do so, and that when you think nobody is ever going to see the real you, your personal hygiene kinda slips. Amusingly, the real Bruce looks way (WAY) more attractive than his orange-hued surrogate, with all wrinkles air-brushed out and a nice blond wig sat on top.
Willis has almost cornered the market in the role of one-guy-against-the-system, appearing in his natural cynicism and self-reliance the natural inheritor of Humphrey Bogart, and like Bogart he is becoming more attractive as he ages (he is now 54). Interestingly our own dear Rosamund Pike pops up with a reasonably convincing American accent as his fragile and increasingly remote wife.
Definitely worth a look.