Fatality: Surrogate Greer Loses.

Intervening Layers of Reality Crushed By Classic Video Game

Got an action-adventure movie with lots of explosions? Bruce Willis is your man.  But can he handle moody, nature of humanity, philosophy of mediated experience kinda stuff?  Dunno.  Harrison Ford did an unbeatable job at it in Blade Runner.  Now Willis has his chance in the forthcoming film Surrogates.  In the movie, humans live most of their lives sealed in apartments, running robots by remote control.  The robots walk around and do stuff.  It’s safer that way.  Now that’s a stupid future to be proud of.  Let’s run up huge electric bills and generate pollution just so our robots can hang out together.  Sheesh.  At least getting plugged into The Matrix was environmentally friendly, methane and all.

Anyway, so let’s just accept the premise and move on.  The plot of the movie is that someone is killing surrogate operators (who are supposed to be safe little couch potatoes) by killing their droids, which isn’t supposed to be possible.  Enter Agent Greer (Bruce Willis), jawn jawn, thaw him out and make him walk around with the robots and figure out what happened.  Kinda sounds a bit too much like Blade Runner if you ask me.  The French Post-structuralists would love it (especially Jean “Nothing Exists And You Smell Like Onions” Baudrillard).  Then again, if you ask me, I’d say the surrogates might be dying due to being jacked just a little too far into a Mortal Kombat competition.  Old school.  Maybe on a Sega Genesis.  None of those newfangled Cyrax or Smoke characters, though.  That would just be too many layers of robots.  Nah.  Just the classics.  Good old Liu Kang, Sonja Blade, Sub-Zero.  Well, maybe Baraka–it’s hard to argue with Baraka.  But if anybody could, it would be Bruce Willis.