Movie night

We went to a friend's place to watch Surrogates tonight. It was ok but not as good as I'd hoped it would be.

Surrogates is a concept movie: people live through a robot, or surrogate, that's hooked up to their brains. So the people lie in a chair connected to this surrogate that goes out and lives their lives for them. It's an extension of game avatars, really, except that people represent themselves via these robots instead of avatars on a screen.

Of course all is not well in surrogate-land; not everyone wants to live through a surrogate because they feel that they aren't really living that way. Plus someone has gone out and made a weapon that kills not only the surrogate but the person behind it. The rest of the movie deals mostly with who made that technology, what they're going to do with it, and how to stop them.

On paper, this sounds like an interesting movie, doesn't it? Sadly, it's not nearly as interesting as I thought it would be. This is partly because some things don't make all that much sense. For example, all of the surrogates look pretty normal, even at a club that people go to. Why are there no people with horns or tails or other crazy looks? Why are people driving cars from today, fourteen years from now? Why are people driving cars at all?

Setting aside those aspects, the characters in the story are one-dimensional; they lack depth and their motives are quite transparent. This isn't just a problem with the characters, actually. The whole story is lacking depth and interest. It's as though the producers didn't flesh out the story enough, as though they thought about the first consequences of living through surrogates but they didn't push the story further to make it interesting.

This isn't a movie worth going out of your way to see, but if it happens to be on tv or something it wouldn't be a complete waste of watching time.