People Are So Fake

Welcome to the world of 'Surrogates'

By Don Kaye
Special to MSN Movies

Imagine a world where you experience everything you possibly can, live life to the fullest, and always look your best, yet never suffer any real consequences. For example, there's no exposure to actual physical harm even if you, say, jump off a building. You communicate and interact with others around you, but don't necessarily get to know who they are, or what they may really look like. Any of this sound familiar? It might strike a chord if you're a member of Second Life, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or any other online social network, virtual world or alternate reality game where real, face-to-face human contact is replaced by something else.

That concept is the basis of "Surrogates," the new Touchstone Pictures release that stars Bruce Willis, Radha Mitchell, Rosamund Pike and Ving Rhames. Based on the 2006 comic book/graphic novel "The Surrogates" by writer Robert Venditti and artist Brett Weldele, the story is set in the year 2017 (2054 in the book), where nearly everyone in the world stays nestled in their apartments while their surrogates (highly advanced androids indistinguishable from humans) operate in the outside world. With real citizens safely tucked away in their homes, remotely controlling the better-looking robots that represent them, peace reigns, crime is almost nonexistent, and people theoretically get to live a complete life without risk or pain.

"Right from the moment that I read the graphic novel, the idea struck me as so simple," says director Jonathan Mostow, speaking to two reporters while on a break from editing the film on the Disney lot in Burbank, Calif. "This story metaphorically takes the experience we're all having now with the Internet and brings it into a form through which we can dramatize it." He adds, "Everybody who uses a computer or a gadget of some kind ... feels empowered by technology, and also at the same time sort of shackled by it. I love e-mail, but I know I spend way too much time every day writing e-mails. So I think that's the appeal that people who watch the movie see in it. They see these characters using this technology, which makes them theoretically more connected than ever, and yet all feeling disconnected on some level."

Willis' character, an FBI agent named Greer, begins investigating a series of surrogate "murders" that lead to the actual deaths of the human controllers themselves. Suspicion falls on an anti-surrogate religious group led by a figure called the Prophet (Rhames). When his own surrogate is damaged beyond repair while pursuing the killer, Greer leaves his home and ventures into the real world in his own body for the first time in years, only to discover that he does not want to return to his virtual life again.

"We spent a lot of time getting at the emotional and psychological state of Bruce's character over the course of the movie and the evolution that he goes through," says Mostow, whose last directorial effort was 2003's "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines." "At the beginning of the movie, he's sort of vaguely aware that he is dissatisfied in life but doesn't understand how to change it, and becomes over the course of the movie a guy who realizes that he doesn't like living this way and has to figure out how he is going to push back against it."

There are two Greers in the movie: the younger, smoother-skinned surrogate with a full head of hair and an enhanced physique, and the real one, who's older, wearier, more weather-beaten, and certainly more follicularly-challenged. "One of the points of the movie is that we obsess with this idea of physical perfection, and perfection in general," says Mitchell, when we speak with her the next day at a Beverly Hills hotel. "You put on a surrogate and you look perfect and you have the perfect experience. You don't have to experience it being too cold or too hot. You can filter your reality and tailor it however you want it to be. Ultimately, the question is: Is that satisfying or is not being in control part of the experience of being human? You know, the fact that you are gonna die and you are gonna grow old -- all of that is part of the cycle. And if you sanitize that part of the experience, you don't actually get to be a human being."

Mitchell plays Agent Peters, Greer's partner, and, like most of the other actors in the film, she plays two versions of the role. In one striking scene, the young, pretty Peters surrogate is sent home by her supervisor. When the robot is turned off, we see the real Peters wake up in her darkened apartment, looking a lot less glamorous than her avatar.

"You don't see a lot of the real Peters. She's just like a hint of a personality," says the Australian star of "Rogue" and "Pitch Black." "At first I was not into the idea that she was more drab-looking, mainly for reasons of vanity, I guess. I thought that her human form should just look as I would without makeup or whatever. But Jonathan was like, 'No, I want a more exaggerated change.' So then when I understood what he was getting at, I took on a padded bum, a slightly false nose, smaller teeth. And being able to change from one look to the other was quite an amazing experience, because you lose this sense of bias that one is better than the other."

The character of Peters is actually invented for the movie; in the graphic novel, Greer is a city detective and his male partner is named Pete Ford. Mostow acknowledges taking liberties with the source material, but adds that "The Surrogates," while acclaimed within the comic book world, does not come burdened with the mythology or expectations of a "Watchmen" or "Batman" movie.

"If you do 'Watchmen,' the whole question is, 'How is it different from the novel?' And as a filmmaker, you just have this giant set of 100 million eyes looking over your shoulder to see how you reinterpreted it," he says. "Here we had total creative freedom. So we simply took the idea, went back to the spine of the narrative, but then adapted it to the needs of a movie.

"The graphic novel's not that long, and it also stops every 15 or 20 pages for this very interesting, sort of interstitial stuff that talks about the world in which it's set," continues the director. "That stuff was really cool. But the trick was weaving it into the narrative ... In some instances we were able to explore ideas really deeply and in a satisfying way, and in other areas we were able to take ideas and sort of do brushstrokes at them, because that's all that the format of a motion picture allows you to do."

Based on the footage that Mostow showed to a group of journalists in a screening room, it appears that the movie is fast-moving and has a futuristic visual style (also different from the moody, almost noirish pace and imagery of the book). "When we started with the graphic novel, we said, 'Great, let's turn this into a movie. How do we do it?'" recalls Mostow. "And the first thing we said was, 'Well, let's not go with the film noir type of narrative. Let's do something different.' We spent months exploring all sorts of really different, far-out-there narrative structures. At the end of the day, we realized that none of them were servicing this really simple idea, which was, 'What if everybody lived their lives this way?' So we realized ultimately that the best thing was to have the spine of this story be a police procedural, which is a recognizable thing that everybody can understand, and then let that take us into this world."

"This world" may not be that far off from the real one. Along with the virtual lives that people now lead online, robotic science is progressing at such a rate that the potential for surrogates to actually exist one day may not be that far-fetched. Like the questions that surround all new technology, Mitchell sees the theme of "Surrogates" as being whether that kind of advancement is good or bad for humanity. "Surrogacy is an exaggeration of a culture that we are already participating in," says the actress. "Will people prefer to spend their time in a fake world, or will they continue to want to spend it in the real world, dealing with their vulnerabilities and dealing with the fact that they can't control everything that happens? I think the movie obviously alludes to the idea that it's preferential to be authentic and mortal and vulnerable and human, and that if we isolate ourselves from that we are missing out on what it means to be part of the species.

"At the same time, it's very exciting to think that you can transcend identity and you can be a man or a woman or whatever you want," Mitchell continues, referring to a scene in the book (which may also have made it into the movie) in which a male surrogate controlled by a man picks up a female surrogate only to discover that it's controlled by a man, too. "Ultimately, I think that would hopefully lead us to focus more and more on the spirit in each of us rather than the physical appearance, when that appearance can be anything."

Don Kaye covers movies, TV and fan culture for MSN.com.