Diamonds are endeavor.

A megalomaniac designs a satellite to harness the sun’s power. And James Bond is there to rain on his parade.

Cold Open Pretty Orange Explosion Zone: James Bond 007 (Pierce Brosnan, in his 4^th and final turn as the superspy) surfs some rad waves into North Korea (reflecting the tenor of the times, no more Russians), infiltrating diamond dealers, led by General’s son Col. Moon and his lieutenant Zao. They blow Bond’s cover, and he hovercrafts (!) and fights his way to a dead-end, killing Col. Moon in the chase. We are always wondering why villains don’t just shoot Bond immediately, but now we can understand a revenge motive, as the General imprisons Bond and tortures him until he looks like Gandalf after a bad day in Mirkwood.

Opening titles slam in with Madonna’s Die Another Day, which is very catchy, but washed out with insufferable auto-tune that makes me wanna smack her in the mouth, for which she would thank me. Hey, it’s Madonna. The lyrics, “I’m gonna close my body now…” make a lot of sense over the montage of Bond being tortured and closing his body off to suffering. Graphics of naked women on fire and naked women made of ice – to presage the plot of the movie…

Bearded bloodied Bond is eventually traded back to MI6 for Zao (Rick Yune), who was obviously captured after the Pretty Orange Explosions, which gave him the oomph Bond gimmick  – diamonds burned into his face. When Bond is released by the General for the trade, he sincerely thinks the Koreans are going to shoot him in the back, and Brosnan really sells it. Gone is the smug, gone is the suave, here is a man readying himself for nothingness.

But Bond is far from home free – matter of fact, he is home-imprisoned – as MI6, like any government, doesn’t trust its captured agents, so keep him locked in quarantine, with M (Judi Dench) rescinding his 00 status. (There is a heated exchange over Bond’s cyanide pill, which he apparently “got rid of years ago.” Does this make him a good agent or a bad risk? Was he so over-confident about his powers of not breaking under torture that he thought he’d never need it?) He says he was set up in North Korea, so, abandoned by his people, he must go it alone to find the mole.

Berry as Jinx: ass ass in.

So it’s that old premise: Bring the hero low. Find the mole that ruined his life.

One of the funniest scenes of any Bond movie is surely Bond walking barefoot into a swanky hotel in his soaking hospital togs and Gandalf-beard, shirt open on wet torso, after escaping the MI6 facility and swimming the bay, telling the concierge, “My usual suite, please.”

Bond starts tracking Zao. Onto Cuba, where he meets the plain-bordering-on-ugly Halle Berry as she exits the sea (in obvious homage to Ursula Andress in DR. NO, except not so deformed). Suddenly she’s dry. Bond meets her. Suddenly she’s wet again.

Berry is Jizz—sorry, Jinx, and she’s as smug as Bond (because this was that odd time in the world when people were telling Halle Berry she was all that), though I don’t know why – she’s not even a quarter as pretty as Bond. Nice side-boob though. Jinx is also some ass– I mean, also some kind of assassin. The dynamic of an adept female spy working alongside Bond worked so well in TOMORROW NEVER DIES they do it again, with Jinx. She’s no damsel in distress, and Berry does a great job of selling the strong woman who’s every bit as badass as Bond.

Jinx is under the command of Michael Madsen, whose sudden appearance in the MI6 office alongside regulars like Colin Salmon, made me think HE was the mole (brand new face in the office, and a star to boot; from RESERVOIR DOGS in 1992, in the space of just the decade till 2002’s DIE ANOTHER DAY, amassing over 60 credits! He’s like the modern day Lyle Talbot!)

Written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (who both started with THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, and would go on to write all the Daniel Craig era films), directed by Lee Tamahori (the brutal ONCE WERE WARRIORS, 1994), we once again feel the vignette-to-vignette nature of this Bond adventure. As with most of the convoluted plots of the Bond series, you can never quite work out the intricacies – but you always get the objective of each vignette.

Bond traces Zao to a DNA facility in Cuba. Jinx is there too, destroying files of herself. This place is one step beyond Witness Protection – it constructs new identities through “gene therapy” – reshaping your face completely. Zao escapes both Bond and Jinx. And Bond traces him to a London diamond merchant, Gustav Graves (the excellent Toby Stephens, smugger than Moore and Brosnan put together); a fencer, parachutist, knight, adventurer, whose oomph Bond gimmick is that he doesn’t sleep.

Gustav is constructing a satellite that can re-direct the sun’s golden beams on farmlands, or concentrate golden beams into destructive blasts. And he calls it… Goldeneye—no wait, that was copyrighted three films ago… damn! It woulda been perfect! (He calls it Icarus instead… does it bode well for anything if it’s named after the hubristic young mythological Greek who flew too close to the sun and died?)

I don’t know who’s cooler: the Black James Bond or Mr. White.

Bond touches tips with Gustav in a ferocious swordfight, well-staged through common rooms and libraries of this grande olde British club. Madonna cameos as a fencer; her accent cameos as British. When asked to bet on the Gustav-Bond fight, she demurs, “I don’t like cockfights.” It’s funny because she’s a slut.

Rosamund Pike is Miranda Frost, Gustav’s right-hand woman, young and smooth and ice-queen, turning down Bond’s advances. Until she sleeps with him. Oh, we can use the excuse that she’s a double-agent, but we all know it’s because in a Bond film, sexism wins.

Bond, back in the begrudging good graces of M, visits Q (John Cleese, now entrenched as the Quartermaster due to the tragic death of Desmond Llewelyn; sadly, Cleese would not continue into the Daniel Craig era). He previews an invisible car and, for a hot second, as his legs are refracted through the invisible car, we get an unintentional taste of The Minister of Silly Walks! Or maybe that was a sly wink?

Next insane location: an Ice Hotel. These things DO exist – which is a wonder in itself, constructed for tourist seasons and melted months later – but never in the fancy fashion of Gustav’s Ice Palace from this movie, a wholly impractical construct with hedonistic frills no sane ice hotelier would attempt). Jinx is there too!

We discover Gustav is actually Col. Moon whom Bond “killed” in the Cold Open Pretty Orange Explosion Zone, altered through gene therapy, Moon snidely admitting that Bond was his English character-model: “That unjustifiable swagger, those crass quips, the defense mechanism concealing such inadequacy…”

Bond: “So you live to die another day?”

It’s racism so deep we hardly see it. The plot twist required Bond to have a connection to the diamond dealer/sun king, and not realize it. So couldn’t they make this guy another Asian? At the least, an ambiguous Easterner? Instead of going all the way to WHITE MAN? Now I happen to be a fan of this particular white man (mostly because he looks like Clint Eastwood), but we can’t shake the feeling the movie is implying that another Asian guy would not have played well because all Asians look alike. Or – the filmmakers might think the audience would automatically regard him as the villain, because we opened with the North Korean villains. Thing is: we regard Gustav as the villain anyway, through his smugness and Bond’s suspicions, so… how do we get to kumbaya from here?… Do tell us, filmmakers!

The main annoying aspect is still the talking-not-shooting syndrome of all the bad guys. Or the shooting madly at the heroes when they’re running away, but as soon as the heroes give themselves up, the shooting stops. Frost says, with a sword at Jinx’s neck, “Drowning you didn’t seem to work. We’ll have to try something more to the point!”– Shutup with the puns and SKEWER HER!

For all their stupidities, Pierce Brosnan’s Bond films are enjoyable diversions, consistent in their tone and production design. It is during Brosnan’s tenure we see the upheaval in special effects technology in movies, reflected in the use of computers within the storylines of the movies themselves. As computers become more prevalent in this series of movies, so too does Computer Graphic Imagery in the production of the films. GOLDENEYE used that big green writing on computer monitors; by DIE ANOTHER DAY, we have digital readouts, modern-looking screens, virtual reality and holograms.

There’s a thug named Mr. Kil, a laser watch and laser guns, an invisible car, a ring that shatters glass, the villain’s solar suit that looks like Iron Man, a rocket car that races the satellite’s sun beam and – Bond para-sailing across rad waves with icebergs. Movie Maniacs, if you stayed for the gene technology that could change an Asian guy’s face into Nearly Clint Eastwood, you can suspend your disbelief for the parasailing.

I think it was more that Asian/Caucasian plot twist that alienated this movie with Bond fans than the parasailing, which was a dumb surface reason. By replacing the Asian guy with a Brit, the film lost our investment of emotion. It suddenly felt like it was forcing us to invest in a character which we should have a connection with – but which we don’t because – he’s not that character that we met for all of two minutes in the cold open, which we never had the chance to connect with anyway. It’s off the chain batshit. So we feel as lopsided as the airplane that flies through a Goldeneye sunbeam with Bond and Jinx and Frost and Clint Eastwood dressed like Iron Man.

A final scene finds James entering MI6 and laying Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) across her desk for a sensual pumpi—a hologram! Moneypenny’s fantasy… Still, it was kinda nice that both these characters got to makeout in this last turn for both of them.

Bond ends this caper with diamonds and Jizz.

END

Ungodly.

The legend of Perseus continues in WRATH OF THE TITANS, with the kidnapping of Zeus, the treachery of Ares, the disintegration of Poseidon, and the slaying of the Titan Kronos, just like it says in all the Greek myths…. actually, not in any Greek myths; matter of fact, I’m wondering whether the filmmakers have read even one Greek myth in their wretched lives.

Writers David Johnson, Greg Berlanti and Dan Mazeau seem to be using the George Lucas method of storytelling – Making It Up As It Goes Along – and director Jonathan Liebesman is just encouraging them by having such a big effects budget.

It’s surely a spectacle for the eyes, but set your brain on standby for the magnificently thoughtless plotline.

Demi-god Perseus (Sam Worthington), the slayer of the Kraken in CLASH OF THE TITANS 2010, is trying to lead an average mortal’s life as a fisherman in a tiny village – until a Chimera (a two-headed, fire-breathing monster) attacks the village, seemingly for no reason other than the special effects team were bored. Perseus defeats it with no help from all the screaming extras.

Then dad Zeus (Liam Neeson) appears to Perseus  and tells him the gods need his help. In his authentic Australian Greek accent, Perseus asks, “Woy?” Something to do with Making It Up As It Goes Along. Then Zeus teleports outa there in case another fire-breathing thing comes along and he might have to lift a finger to help.

Ares the god of war (Edgar Ramirez) and Hades the god of cheese (Ralph Fiennes) team up to kidnap Poseidon the god of beards (Danny Huston) and Zeus the god of Narnia (wait – isn’t this the guy who can teleport?). They hook Zeus to a divine intravenous rock and start transferring his power to Kronos, who looks like the Catholic version of the horned devil, except he’s ten times bigger than a Balrog and 100 times as dumb. (Though he can only moan one or two words – being fused to the stone of a mountain will leave you pretty inarticulate – he has the distinction of being the one and only actual “Titan” in either of the two films.)

Now Perseus is mad, in the grand tradition of the god Rambo: “This time it’s personal!”

Perseus takes his son Helius (wasn’t Helius/Helios the Sun god who drove his chariot across the sky every morning and– oh, why bother?…) to a temple, where Poseidon uses his teleportation powers to appear and tell them all is lost. Lemme get this straight: he always had the power to teleport (as gods do), but he waited until Hades and Ares bitchbeat him half-to-death before teleporting to a temple where he happened to know Perseus was gonna be? Then he turns to dust – like it says in all the history books.

To rescue Zeus, Perseus recruits the tasty blond ringlets of Queen Andromeda (Rosamund Pike) and the arrogant dreadlocks of Poseidon’s son, Agenor (Toby Kebbell), who gets the film’s funniest line when mocking Perseus: “Mighty Kraken slayer. Shouldn’t he be somewhere posing for a statue?” Followed by the film’s dumbest line, when he tells Perseus “Go to Hell!” even though there was no such thing in Ancient Greece.

They sail in search of Hephaestus (Bill Nighy, so whacked out he references his role as Davy Jones in PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN to Perseus, “I know you: ‘Release the Kraken’ and all that…”). As the forger of Zeus’ thunderbolt, Hades’ pitchfork and Poseidon’s trident, Hephaestus tells Perseus that combining them will create the Spear of Trium, the only weapon that can defeat Kronus. He also knows the way through the unsolvable Labyrinth to rescue Zeus. (‘Labyrinth’? Did someone say Minotaur?!) In asking for his help, Andromeda bows down before Hep (veeery sexy!) and says something so unutterably stupid that it sounds unutterably stupid even while she’s saying it, with that blind blond ambition glazing her eyes: “…but we humans have hope when there is no hope; and we believe when to believe is idiotic, but sometimes, in spite of everything, we prevail.” Yes, and the “prevailing” is not because of your “hope” or “belief” but due to the actual powers brought to bear on the problem; you prevail not because of hope or belief but in spite of it.

At the head of the labyrinth, Ares appears (teleporting, as gods do) and kills Hephaestus and all the extras, leaving our heroes stranded. But it turns out the Labyrinth isn’t that hard to get through, because they do it in what must be record time, with no jump cuts or dead ends. Oh yeah, and Perseus kills a guy in a BULL HELMET. (Unfortunately, I kid you not.)

As Perseus is rescuing Zeus, Kronos is released, raining lava down on Earth while roaring insatiably, as per Movie Monster Protocol.

Perseus must snatch Zeus’s thunderbolt off Ares’ back to create the Spear of Trium (which is getting kinda Try-ING at this point), so even though he has all Queen Blondie’s warriors at his disposal, why does he afford Ares the “honor” of going mano a mano with him? While Ares shields himself behind Perseus’s son Helius. That’s honorable, right?

Meanwhile, Kronos’s double-bodied demons tear through Blondie’s warriors like the toilet paper they have yet to invent to wipe their terrified asses. Think about it: the demons can only run rampant as long as Kronos is alive. So the *logical* move would be to overrun Ares with a horde of warriors, GET THE SPEAR and throw that bad boy at Kronos, thereby nullifying his armies. Instead, Blondie witlessly battles double-bodied demons (again, we presume, because the special effects department was justifying its budget) while Perseus has to do all the lifting on the spear job.

Perseus eventually gets Ares in a headlock, which proves to be his kryptonite: the God of War can defeat hundreds of men with his big man-club and divine pushing – but he can’t escape a good headlock.

Hades suddenly sees the error of his ways after helping Kronos escape. Now let me get this straight: this entity the size of the Chrysler building promised it would decimate the Earth when it was freed, and now it’s actually doing that. Exactly which part was Hades unclear on?

Kronos is defeated when Zeus and Hades kiss and make up and shoot gay-ass lightning bolts at him to “distract” him, while posing like air-guitar champions. Perseus then does his Luke Skywalker and lobs the Spear of Trium into a hole in Kronos’s mouth not much bigger than a womp-rat.

So the god of war is dead? Who’s responsible for all these wars then? Well, that would be Dick Cheney. And Poseidon is dead? I guess that leaves Aquaman in charge of the seas. And Zeus is dead? Who’s in charge of Everything then? Oh, that’s right, Bill Gates.

Perseus! Slayer of the Kraken! Slayer of Kronos! Not only will we never hear the end of this in songs and legends, he’s got the pick of blond ringleted chicks willing to go GREEK for him!

END

Reaching For Grate-ness.

The name is from a series of books by author Jim Grant (pseudonym Lee Child); even so, casting Tom Cruise as a character called JACK REACHER is just asking for the inevitable gay gags, like Jack Reacharound. And what kind of epicness was Grant aiming for anyway? Did he want big chords every time someone said the name, and then putting sunglasses on like David Caruso in CSI?

Ex-military homicide investigator Jack Reacher [–sunglasses–YEEEAAAAGH!–] digs deep into a case involving an ex-military sniper who shot five seemingly random victims, and finds he is – ahem – *reaching* too deep for the likes of the corporate murderers who staged the hits. In his defense, the sniper asks for – Jack Reacher! [dun dun daaah!–sunglasses.] Jack Reacher [dun dun daaah!–sunglasses] unofficially looks into the case, bringing his esoteric military expertise, his photographic memory, his fighting skills, marksmanship, driving expertise and gloriously body-shaved chest.

And his smug. But this is more Tom Cruise’s fault than Jack Reacher’s. I’m sure no author could ever emplace that amount of nerve-jangling smug in any written character. And the worst part is: the Tom Cruise Smug has rubbed off on everyone else in the cast.

Try not to cringe watching Richard Jenkins and David Oyelowo going through Jack Reacharound’s history in that uninterested drawl, like it’s the most offhanded thing in the world: “Well, Jack Reacher’s a ghost, no driver’s license, no residence, no credit cards… Iraq, Afghanistan, The Balkans, – you name it – served with distinction…By all accounts a brilliant investigator…” (Thanks for the character exposition, guys. Do you want the big chords now or should I wait until someone puts on their sunglasses?)

Try not to let the smugness of Reacharound grate on your nerves when he’s investigating the sniper rifle with Oyelowo; the head-waggling walk away from the evidence cage, the rakish tilt in both their heads when they talk to each other like sarcasm was on special at Wal-Mart, the smugness in the questions they ask each other – and never answer; the smugness in Reacharound answering Oyelowo’s question about the rifle serial number a few scenes later. Dragging the smug across scenes!

Then Rosamund Pike appears as the sniper’s lawyer, and all smug breaks loose, as she informs Jenkins and Co. about the law giving her the right to be this smug. She outlines the backstories of all the random shooting victims like she’s doing a first read-through of her sides. (Nice line-read, honey! Take it from the part where you start to give a fuck.) By the way, who cares who these people are? Do you have a nude scene coming up or should I just Google “Rosamund Pike nude”? Goddess-sexy in WRATH OF THE TITANS (2012), here she keeps on way too many clothes for any man to take her blondly – I mean, seriously. Especially not Jack Reacher [dun dun daaah!–sunglasses], who seems to have a history with her, from the way he constantly invades her personal space when giving her orders on what girlie task to do next. Either that, or they should just screw and get it over with. At one point, Reacher exits the bathroom shirtless, and the sexual tension is palpable – between Tom Cruise and his gloriously body-shaved chest.

Mystery is intriguing, although nothing special, and certainly not “gripping” enough knowing that Cruise is the lead, and the production companies will be looking for sequelae ad infinitum, so he’s pretty much guaranteed a Get Out Of Jail Free card if his life is at stake. A purple friend of mine suggested that this mystery thriller would have made a great Batman movie – because that’s what Batman is, a detective. My friend’s (quite credible) suggestion to moviemakers is: disavow all those billion-dollar blockbusters and make 20 affordable, *good* Batman movies for us to enjoy, with very workable scripts along these lines. Although I don’t see how the blockbuster spiral can be quashed with that rollercoaster in motion for over three decades. And with the casting of Ben Affleck as Batman in 2015, not only is it guaranteed to be a billion-dollar baby, but the smug levels will be chokifying.

Suddenly, the great Robert Duvall, as shooting range owner and ex-sharpshooter Cash, whose best character trait is – NO SMUG. We should’ve known that Duvall’s resolute skill would not be affected by Tom Cruise’s – ahem – *reach*… Reacher says something interesting when he doubts Cash’s aim: “It’s a perishable skill.” And Cash, in turn, does something interesting: uses his ears instead of his eyes to aim. You go, Duvall!

You’re kidding me! A 20-minute car chase in 2012? At least with hand-to-hand combat, there is a modicum of creativity employed by the many unique styles and sweet moves that fight choreographers were forced to invent after Steven Seagal ruined everything with his minimalistic smug-kwon-do. But car chases? Jesus! There’s only so much banging of bumpers and slamming of sides that we can endure. Oh, I forgot screeching around corners and the perfunctory car flipping over for no reason other than to annoy me. I will admit, the ending is a surprise. But not worth the other 19 minutes.

Jai Courtney (A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD, 2013) is the Hot Bad Guy, and victim to one of the all-time ludicrous cinematic tropes:

TROPE: the hero and villain face off – one of them is unarmed. The armed person – whether hero or villain – disarms himself (LETHAL WEAPON, COMMANDO, DARK NIGHT RISES, WRATH OF THE TITANS, BULLET TO THE HEAD, EXPENDABLES 2, the list is endless). Why?

Is it called honor – or padding?

Unarmed guy versus unarmed guy – the tension is totally bearable.

Why don’t these guys take a lesson from the Man Among Men, Clint Eastwood? Any time the bad guy is unarmed, he shoots the bad guy. Gladly. At close range, in the back, while baddie is begging for mercy, whatever. If you were the villain, being shot would be your fate – THAT is the right message, not this imaginary “honor” thing. Because it stands to logic that if you  decided to take the path of villainy, then you HAVE no honor, so in the case of the hero disarming himself to battle the villain on equal terms, that’s just stupid, and in the case of the dishonorable villain disarming himself to give the hero an even shot, that’s just ridiculous!

Anyway, so Hot Bad Guy and Reacher scuffle (and I’m sure there’s a reacharound gag in there somewhere) and bones are broken and it’s raining men and just totally street and post-Seagal. And Rosamund asks Reacher to come back to her place for a snuggle, but he declines on the grounds that Others Somewhere might need his help (like his cape is flying in the wind), and that He’ll Find Her When He Needs Her (i.e. booty call), but mostly, cos he’s —

Jack Reacher! [Dun dun– dammit, where’d I leave my sunglasses?]

END

The Swedish Investigation Bureau is too sexy for its investigations.

Rage Against The Machines.

Into this world where we poke, surf, tweet, blog, pillow fight, laugh out loud, tend farms and build empires – all without actually DOING any of it – comes a movie showing us exactly what would happen if our computers really could poke, surf, tweet, blog, pillow fight, laugh out loud, tend farms and build empires for us.

Blueprint for a more perfect Poffy

We’d be sending them out as surrogates for our Selves, in humanoid guise, younger and better-looking than our Selves, controlled remotely by us via neural links. Is this not exactly what we are doing right now “virtually” in our myriad online identities?

SURROGATES may still be termed “science fiction,” but only by the barest of margins – and for how much longer? In this Jonathan Mostow thriller (from the graphic novel by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldes, rewritten for the screen by Michael Ferris and James Brancato, TERMINATOR 3), “surrogates” do everything that humans used to do. Surrogates are the ones who venture out into the “real” world while humans are relegated to the virtual, sitting motionless in recliners, blinders over their eyes, atrophying in darkened rooms in front of their computer screens.

Bruce Willis is Detective Tom Greer. When we first meet him we giggle into our atrophied palms at his stunning Swedish platinum blond hairdo. Soon enough, Tom enters a room where his human operator reclines at a virtual control center – a shaved-headed, rugged yet tired-looking Bruce Willis. I ask you, gentlemen, if you had the thunderfist visage of grizzled, steel-eyed avenger Bruce Willis, would you really want to look like a poreless Swedish boytoy?

With his even blonder and sexier partner Peters (Radha Mitchell), Swedish Tom investigates a slew of murders where people have died at their chairs when their surrogates were destroyed. The surrogate manufacturer VSI (Virtual Self Industries) insists that should not be possible. James Cromwell plays the CEO of VSI, a recluse who sends out little boys as surrogates to take meetings with Bruce’s dollyboy.

VSI’s slogan is “Life… Only Better.” A contingent of humans don’t agree, banding together in Humans Only communities, led by The Prophet (Ving Rhames), and rebelling against the surrogates. Signage at the entrance to their community conjures echoes of THE TERMINATOR: “No Machines Allowed.”

And an underground movement within the humans possesses a kind of ray gun that is doing the surrogate-human killings. That’s the McGuffin that is fussed over, although the excellence of SURROGATES abides in its overarching concept.

The unholy marriage of Terminator and Sex Doll.

Tom’s surrogate is destroyed and he has to venture into the real world in the flesh. The robot-themed movie suddenly becomes a fish-out-of-water tale. Years in the dark have made all humans paranoid agoraphobics, and though Tom “acts” like he is scared of crowds and has panic attacks against being touched or broken, he battles against looking too much like toughguy Bruce Willis. Now sitting in a chair all day should make any normal person potbellied, atrophied and slovenly, but luckily Tom’s real world surrogate is The Bruce Willis – the older he gets, the more like a rock he becomes.

And if there’s anything that Bruce Willis CAN’T do, it’s “fragile.” Hell, that’s why he was so convincing in UNBREAKABLE (unlike breakables like David Bowie in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, for instance). And no matter how much he whined in SIN CITY about being old and weak-hearted, we all laughed at this patently obvious lie. It’s Bruce Willis!

But it doesn’t suddenly become a fist-fest. In this thought-provoking drama, the action scenes are not gratuitous, but organic to the plot and more powerful for their suddenness and infrequency.

Hard on the heels of LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD, Bruce is again warring against technology. In 12 MONKEYS, Bruce was awakened from a chambered slumber, and though he probably should have atrophied in that instance as well, he emerges as tough as… well, as Bruce Willis.

Rosamund Pike plays Tom’s wife, who has not ventured out in years; mortally dependent on her surrogate. The estrangement between Tom and his wife is just one of the disturbing subplots that hits home how powerful a tale SURROGATES is; with more intriguing and complex ramifications and implications than we can cover, on the discomfort and alienation that grows between people who have built up discrete “other selves” as shields against reality.

And I cannot help but see the disturbing parallels with our Real World. We have become our disembodied icons. Watch carefully as you walk down a city street, or in a restaurant or gym – in these public places where humans used to congregate and interact, now the vast majority are connected to electronic devices; people would rather talk to a person on their phone than the person sitting right next to them in a restaurant!

“These people bug me! They really bug me!!”

Online, our surrogates deal with buying, selling, meeting, organizing, chatting, sexing… those impostor selves are out there in the www ether living better lives than we are; Wii and karaoke and amazon and YouTube and thousands of phone apps emulate real world activities to dupe us into relying on our avatars like addictive drugs. The pushback comes in the form of the “green” fad and the manufacturers of sports gear and the live band promoters – marketing that it’s better to GO OUTSIDE. Tragic that ‘going outside’ has degenerated to nothing more than a marketing ploy, which is in turn combated by electronics manufacturers in making everything electronic compact enough to take with you… outside.

The irony is too obvious: we may feel more connected but we are more isolated than ever.

At one point, Tom’s real self tries to cajole his wife’s “surry” into coming out and meeting him in reality, but she just shuts down in front of him. Metaphor and allegory is one thing; being able to literally shut your wife down like that – now that’s something Tom shouldn’t be complaining about!

Tom slash Bruce thunderfists his way to discovering a plot involving the destruction of all surrogates, to force humans into reemerging from their self-imposed home exiles. At first, being the “villain’s” plan, we take it for granted that plot is eeevil — but wait… IS it evil – or the salvation of humankind?…

When all the surrogates drop “dead” in the cities, a radio announcer’s final words, “It appears, at least for now, that we are on our own…” Startling words for a species that is overpopulating the planet. Yet all too true for the aptly-named Twit generation who have entombed themselves in their domiciles erroneously believing they have “friends” because their facebook page tells them so, sitting motionless in recliners, blinders over their eyes, atrophying in darkened rooms in front of computer screens…

END