I really wanted to like Surrogates. Honestly. But it’s hard to like a movie that’s working so hard against itself, especially given the simple, straightforward comic series that inspired it. It’s kind of mind boggling, actually… Anyone who read The Surrogates from Top Shelf knew it was a movie pitch in comic form. The book looks, feels, and reads like a movie. And despite certain elements that are faithful, Jonathan Mostow’s film works extra hard to create differences in the plot that, by no means, need to be there in the first place.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

If you haven’t read The Surrogates by Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, the idea is this: in the near future, people no longer go outside. For fourteen years, people have interacted through increasingly lifelike robotic surrogates. The “Surries” can’t be hurt or killed, can look however you want (given the right price), and basically create, almost over night, a world filled with no sexism or racism. And then someone starts killing surrogates. Not just the surrogates, in fact, but by extension, their operators.

So yeah, simple sci-fi set-up, typical movie set-up, and should be the makings of a good mystery. So why does it feel so wrong?

Let’s start with Mostow’s direction. The majority of the movie is filmed on off angles, trying to give the sense of a world off kilter, where danger lurks behind every corner. It isn’t until the end when (spoilers on, and when I say spoilers on, I mean “don’t watch any of the trailers, because the last scene is in every one of them”) people start returning to the real world that the camera rights itself. Problem is, there isn’t really any tension. It’s not enough to simply indicate that there should be tension, without the tension itself existing.

Same goes through the score, which is bombastically Hitchcockian even in scenes where characters are just walking from their car, or using an elevator. See above note regarding tension.

This isn’t even the biggest problem with the movie. Look, I understand a choice needed to be made at some point, and in this case, the choice was made that whenever actors were “in” their surrogates, they would act stiff like robots. Except… They just come off as stiff, terrible actors. Maybe they are all stiff terrible actors, I don’t know. Bruce Willis out of his surrie certainly doesn’t seem interested in being in the movie too much (he wanders around in a daze, or drunk; again, a character choice, and I would contend, the wrong one). But you get stiff dialogue, stiff acting, and uninteresting choices across the board.

There are also a couple of other little points I want to make, but I’ll skirt the spoilers here. Ving Rhames is poorly cast as Prophet, a pro-human activist. Also, there’s a rather major change from the end of the comic series that screams Hollywood/test audience tampering to the max, and is highly unfortunate, because that moment in the series has incredible emotional power. And the mystery doesn’t hold up to scrutiny even for a moment.

To bring this full circle, it’s all too bad, because I did want to like the movie. I even wanted to like it pretty much the whole way through. The effects are generally very good, and the one good choice (a future world that’s basically our own, with only the difference of a surrogates based economy) is a good one. But the whole thing amounts to a convoluted mess.

It’s a shame, too, as the movie is essentially I, Robot, with a different sort of robot. But where that movie magically transcended it’s potential disaster-hood, Surrogates falls right in step with its worst impulses.