September... The month where the kids go back to school, Bumbershoot happens, baseball rosters get really big, and Jason Statham releases another crappy action movie. In general, September and January are the two 'dump months' of the calendar year... when studios release movies that they have little faith in ( or that will only appeal to a limited audience (Stomp the Yard or Tyler Perry's latest endeavor).
Surrogates and Pandorum were both released the last weekend of September 2009. Surrogates was the higher budgeted movie at 80 M, grossing a combined 60.5 M worldwide and domestic. It also featured a bigger 'name' cast, headlined by Bruce Willis and a trailer featured Mr. Willis fighting robots. Pandorum cost 40 M, but failed to crack 15 M worldwide. Pandorum's previews gave it a Resident Evilish vibe, it was produced by Paul W.S. Anderson (the man behind the Mortal Kombat movie, the Death Race remake, and all 3 live action Res Evil films), and starred the poor man's Harrison Ford, Dennis Quaid.
Based on those descriptions... Surrogates obviously comes out on top, having at least a chance to make back some money on bluray/dvd sales and rentals, but both were financial failures. I'm not to going into a lot of detail reviewing these, because both were fairly derivative... but some quick bullet pointish thoughts.
Surrogates... The central concept is that in the near future, 98% of people live their lives through robotic 'surrogates' that can get into dangerous situations while keeping their owners harmfree and far away. In and itself, its not bad idea for a movie, and personally, I hope that some day war could fought in that sort of way... just robots fighting and keeping humans safer.
The acting for the most part is decent enough. Willis goes through the motions, using his combination of cynicism, inventiveness, and vulnerablility to play the same character he's played many times before. Supporting cast... Rastafarian Ving Rhames was entertaning (its a different sort of character than his usual 'tough guy'), James Cromwell (the farmer from Babe) played another grumpy authority figure, and Radha Mitchell, while fairly attractive, really needs more fleshed out parts in movies. I'd like to figure out if its the writing or her talent why she's so bland and forgettable, but not really bad.
Plotwise, Surrogates was decent (how the Matrix started meets I, Robot describes it well) and the ending actually makes a lot of sense, its just the setup that makes the whole film crumble. Offhand, there are enough problems with the concepts of surrogate robots that it just killed the movie for me. I watched this yesterday... and I've come up with 5 reasons to prove how stupid it is (no real spoilers here, if you watch the first few minutes of the movie, these issues should be obvious).
1. Why isn't everyone obese? I mean, you'd still have to eat and drink, but controlling a surrogate means you pretty much are immobile in a chair the whole day.
2. Wouldn't this kill off the massive restaurant industry? I mean, the surrogates themselves don't have to eat anything and that's 98% of the population moving around in this movie. I mean, they could bring back carryout, but I can't see a bunch of people sending their robots to get Jack in the Box tacos...
3. How cheap are these super advanced surrogates? Everyone seems to have them, and they are super advanced (I think there's a 10 year timeline or so in the intro from when they get invented to mass produced). Think about personal computers, I mean it took at least 10 years just to have something like the Apple 2GS, Amiga, or Commodore 64 from the room sized computers of the 70s... I can't believe that they would be that affordable for 'everyone' to have them...
4. The surrogates seem to be as strong and agile as the script calls for. At some points, they are really strong, can jump almost like Spiderman, take a fair amount of damage... This isn't a spoiler, its in every preview! Yet, in some scenes, they get taken out in just stupid ways. I realize that average people are 'behind the wheel' but if I had one of these things, I'd be jumping and climbing around everywhere. I mean, it would be expensive and maybe a little silly to have everyone bounding around like kangaroos, but even from an efficiency standpoint, it doesn't make sense. Its not like the robots get tired! (they could lose battery power maybe, but there seems to be recharging stations everywhere!)
5. This last one REALLY ground my gears. The surrogate robots use cell phones to communicate and talk to each other like humans! Think about this, these superadvanced robots controlled by wireless signal from great distances still use cell phones? Think about the Matrix, the Agents just sort of thought to each other through their earpieces. When Trinity needed piloting skill in the first Matrix, they just uploaded it into her brain, and she was a human! I mean, I realize the movie needs dialogue or else it would be really boring if robots just gave each other all knowing looks back and forth. For a non robot equivalent, instead of bluetooths, people starting using those old rotary phones..
Enough ranting about the stupidity of Surrogates and onto Pandorum...
I can't really say much about the plot without completely ruining it.
So instead, I'll discuss the setup a bit though, its about two crewman on a spaceship played by Ben Foster (Angel from Xmen3 or the crazy sharpshooter from 3:10 to Yuma) and Dennis Quaid trying to fix their damaged ship. See, they are trying to get from Earth to some distant planet without a Star Trek/Wars warp drive. This would take a really, really long time, so there are many different 'shifts' of crewmen who work for a few years, then go back to a deep cryogenic sleep. This seems like the way you'd handle a manned interstellar mission...
Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system... is 4.5 light years away. Meaning if we sent a spaceship at 1/10th light speed (which is currently technologically possible, but would be ridiculously expensive), it would get there in 45 or so years. It would then take another 45 years to get back to earth. Given the limitations of human life expectancy and the difficulties of raising children in space to man a return mission, this would seem insurmountable. However, what if you had 6 shifts of people operating the same ship? Each would only be awake for roughly 15 years, and if you could cryogenically freeze them so that they couldn't age in the meantime (well, that in and itself is sort of silly), it would help with the aging problem.
Problem is, making a movie about a long trip like that would be tedious at best, so, we get some bland monsters that are a blend of the Ghosts of Mars and Gollum. These chase our heroes around dimly lit corridors, feast on a diet of extras and supporting characters, and disappear when the script needs to get in some exposition. Yep, the middle section is a lot like the crappier parts of the first 3 Alien movies, especially the 'running through the tunnels' part from Alien3. However, the ending pulls everything back together and had a twist I didn't really anticipate at all.
So if you want a September sci movie with an interesting concept, bland action, and a cool ending, skip Surrogates and check out Pandorum.
That's all I have to say about that.
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