Surrogates (film)/Headscratchers

• This really bothers me. The surrogates cause minor body issues in a small percentage of users, and save tens of thousands of lives every day. How is their destruction a good thing?
  • It's moral degeneration caused by being over-dependent on technology. People stop being responsible for many of their actions and forfeit "natural" living in favor of a mediated, safer existence. Essentially, it's pushing a premature singularity of an immature world. It's even showed to have a malign effect on people's health, since they spend so much time uplinked that their bodies are left unkempt and unhealthy.
• If you can create a humanoid body that operates in a convincingly human-like fashion, you have defeated most of the problems with cybernetics. Why stick to existing in a human body and operating via telepresence? Why just just put people in the bodies and let them walk around themselves?
  • Technology to remote control artificial bodies =/= technology to transfer minds into artificial bodies.
    • But technology that lets you enjoy sex and drugs in a surrogate form means you can pipe experiences directly into the brain--where's the world of virtual reality that ought to exist?
  • One of the elements that is stressed (at least in the film) is the 'safety' of the surrogates. The plot is driven by the discovery that people CAN be killed through the surrogates in some manner. If they were actually IN the bodies, then they would be much more vulnerable (if not as vulnerable as there were in flesh and blood bodies).

• The movie states that surrogates are very cheap to make and used all over the world. Even in poorer regions like Africa? So who makes the surrogates? Is there a pecking order between those that can afford amazingly attractive surrogates and those that can only afford something cheaper and less attractive? IMO it would have been a more interesting movie if there were economic constraints over who could afford a surrogate, and more social commentary over the value of attractiveness to the society. Bruce Willis' character is certainly looked upon with disdain when he stops using his surrogate but there could have been more of that.
  • Yeah, they went from lab experiments 14 years earlier to "98% of the world using surrogates in their daily lives." Yeah. Do PHONES have that level of penetration even now? I don't think so.
    • A huge portion of the worlds population is in Europe, China, India, and the US where they conceivably could get that far reaching, cell phones have gotten to the point of ubiquitousness in Europe and the US in nearly the same amount of time.
    • In this sense 98% of 'The world' could just mean the USA, like the world series, the planets most funny whatever and so on. Poorer countries could have cheaper surrogates like the loaner model and they are not as popular.
    • The newscasters' voices at the end make it clear that major cities all over the planet were hit, not just the U.S.
  • Possibly the film is set in a Verse where epidemics such as AIDS have actually eliminated much of the Third World's population altogether. That would be another motivation for people to gravitate to surrogates, if so, as avoiding disease is another selling point mentioned in the VSI ads.

• The greatest plothole I find in this movie is that the world in the movie has essentially been turned into the internet. Okay, now think about that for a second. The last thing you want is to live in the internet. If someone wanted to in the movie, he/she could simply go around and be an ass all he/she wants. Who's going to stop him/her? All one would have to do is hide their real body very well and have some back-up surrogates and... tadah! You now have a real life internet troll.
  • And who's to stop someone from using something a bit more dangerous than a surrogate? Mind controled Gundam anyone?
    • Maybe the fact that, um, there aren't things more dangerous than surrogates? And that's not a plothole: That's sorta demonstrated as the sort of thing people do in the first scene. That kid wasn't exactly acting all nice and proper when he was out clubbing, after all.
    • They can be a jerk all they want. Only if they commit a crime, the police can shut down the surrogate as we saw in that one scene with the two surrogates that looked like they were going to rape that woman.
    • There's also a limitation imposed on Surrogate Trolls in that the actual surrogates are fairly expensive and require legal registration. Part of the reason Internet Trolls get away with what they do is because it's possible to create dozens of accounts (or more) at most websites for free. If one account is closed by the administrator, ignored by users or otherwise ostracized by the community, there's always plenty more the troll can use. Hypothetically, only the wealthy would be able to afford to be Surrogate Trolls.
  • The fact that anything a surrogate observes is apparently recorded on their operator's chair, at least for a time, would also argue against such behavior, as the person you irritate today might just upload the tape of your misbehavior to the actual internet tomorrow, letting the whole world know what a jerkass you are and which surrogate to ostracize.

• How the hell are there still cell phones in this universe? The surrogates basically ARE cell phones, and yet I remember at the very least the military dude had a bluetooth headset in his ear. Also, at some points aren't the surrogates sort of redundant? Couldn't the world just be virtual reality at some point?
  • Force of habit. Its noted that quite a few people in here don't like it being mentioned that they operate machines and prefer to think of it as a second body.
  • As for the whole world being a virtual reality, well, your mind is still in your real body, and that still needs real-life support. Who's gonna do stuff in real life if everyone's busy having fun in virtual?
• Wouldn't a simple electronic jamming system put a good chunk of the military out of use? And why is all of the technology except surrogates still the same despite the ability to build walking cars or mecha? Ghost in the Shell had a more well thought out cyberpunk set up.
  • I would assume that the military would have developed some sort of safeguard against the jamming issue. It should have been addressed in the comic (I can't speak for the movie) though.
  • The filmmakers' answers to the car/cellphone/biometric scanner questions (according to the DVD Commentary) is that they were worried that the plot would be too complicated to follow.

• If people can choose their own appearance, where are all the cat people? For that matter, where are all the klingons and wookees? Every surrogate in fits a very narrow definition of 'beauty' with two very unimaginative exceptions. May be a side effect of Creator Provincialism.
  • There's also a distinct lack of redheads, but plenty of blondes so furries shouldn't feel alone in this aspect.
  • Maybe the weird ones are saved up for Casual Surrogate Fridays?
  • They keep to themselves and complain about fursecution while everyone laughs at them.
  • It could be argued that making something like that would be so niche that VSI wouldn't bother making them. The top of the line surrogates in the movie barely make it out of the Uncanny Valley, can you imagine how much it would cost to make a realistic purple fox-ocelot hybrid? But that doesn't explain how few minority surrogates there were.
  • Only the very rich are shown to have more than one surrogate, so if you had a truly alien surrogate it would be counterproductive. Keep in mind this is the body you'd be walking around with all the time, 24/7. School, work, the club, everywhere. They're not just for recreation. The reason there aren't any freaky surrogates is pretty much the same reason you don't see people running around in costumes in real life.
  • There were lots of replacement hands and faces on display in the beauty salon, so presumably someone who's into cosplay could swap out some of their surrogate's external coverings when they want to dress up. We don't see people looking like that on the street, because most of the movie takes place in the business district where you wouldn't see many furries hanging out with the suits, any more than you'd see many Goths there in real life.

• At the end of the movie, when Greer shuts down all the Surrogates, they show all the cars skidding to a halt and hitting things, but what about the people flying planes? Sure, nobody on the planes is alive, but what about the residential buildings that the planes hit? More importantly, since there's a magic switch that can insulate the operators from damage, why does he wait 'til the end of the movie to press it? Why aren't operators insulated from damage all the time?
  • In that case, it seemed they were insulated through a similar process to shutting down the Surrogates, like you see the guy doing earlier in the movie.
  • At the end, the newswoman clearly says that there were no casualties caused by the shutting down of all the surrogates. Which is laughably implausible. Planes/cars/buses hitting buildings, Surrogate surgeons in the middle of complicated and dangerous operations on humans, etc. There's no way in hell there would be no casualties, the filmmakers just threw that in there for a rosy happy ending despite it being hugely unlikely.
    • Would surrogate-users actually fly anywhere? It's possible that travelers just rent temporary access to a robot at the location they want to visit. No crowded airports, humiliating security checks, or cramped seating in coach.
      • The movie is inconsistent about the logistics of that - it's shown that there are temporary surrogates, but they also say a surrogate must be keyed to a specific user, which may have to be done in person, and we don't know what the range is - it's possible you can't control a surrogate in China from New York. At the very least, most travelers would prefer to send their surrogate on a plane than use a cheap loaner while on vacation, so there would still be planes. It's also established that there ARE non-luddites who prefer not to use surrogates (like the police techie). And certainly people who've just been transferred to a job in another country would want to actually move to that country, and anyone requiring specialized medical attention would need to move their actual body to where the specialist surgeons are. There wouldn't be a lot of non-surrogates on any given flight, but if every plane in the world went down at once, there would be some deaths.
      • There would also be cargo flights, as goods and raw materials would still have to be moved about.
      • Surrogates have also effectively doubled the world population, if 98 percent (or whatever) of people use one. Sure, half the population is lying motionless in a stim chair and the other half don't have to eat, but....
        • This is probably slightly balanced by the fact that using surrogates acts as birth control and surrogates can't get pregnant, and that most people are having sex in their surrogates. Over time this could balance the population. People are also using less energy by keeping their bodies at home, and while surrogates take up space, they also don't need to eat just electricity.

• The whole point of the plot (in the movie, at least) is that the creator of the surrogates has changed his mind, decided that surrogates are bad, and wants to sacrifice all of humanity to un-create them. Yet he seems completely heartbroken when it turns out that his ploy accidentally caused the death of his son. The son is an avid surrogate user, who is known to use his father's surrogates - so if all surrogate users had indeed been sacrificed, wouldn't that have killed his son anyway?
  • I imagine that the problem could have been solved with a simple phone call beforehand, even a lie like "My sources in the company tell me that there's a good chance everyone logged in at X time will suffer have their Surrogate's wifi fried, log off and keep it someplace safe at X hour on Y day". Had his son refused to go offline when the evil plan came into effect, he could have had an aide on standby blow the surrogate's CPU out. Uncomfortable for them, but they'd have been logged off and safe.

• At one point the main characters walk past a whole factory line churning out surrogates. So that means there's a computer running that line that has all the blueprints/shematics/etc already loaded into it. There's also shops and mechanics who do surrogate repairs and upgrades, which means there's plenty of people with complete knowledge of exactly how to make a surrogate. Plus, it's shown that lots of users have extras/copies of their surrogates lying around unconneced. What all this means, of course, is that Bruce Willis' decision to fry all the surrogates and heroically "rescue" humanity is going to force people to live in their own bodies for... oh, about half a day? Yeah, that totally justifies shutting down the entire world and costing untold billions in property damage and loss of life!
  • Plus, once the security tape gets out showing him very clearly pressing the 'N' key on that computer he's going to be up on about 5 billion counts of vandalism. And quite possibly several thousand of manslaughter, seeing as he directly caused all the planes in the sky to crash at once, and single-handedly incapacitated the staff of every single hospital, fire department, police station, utilities plant, and safety office in the world. If spending more time with his wife was his motivation, you'd think he could have found a slightly less globally devastating way to do it.
    • He doesn't press the N key, actually. He doesn't push anything. The other guy is telling him to hit Y, and Greer is clearly intending to hit N, but the cops (who think he's still the other guy in the girl's body) put a bullet through the surrogate's head before he can actually hit the button.
    • Actually, he does press the key. You can clearly hear the click just before they shoot him.
    • Nobody sees him press N, though. From the tech and everyone else's point of view, he just thought about it for a while and was about to hit Y when the cop shot him. His fault is just thinking a bit too long... the real fault is of the cop who shot him. Or at least, that's what I'd tell the world were I in his place, to avoid rotting in jail for the rest of my days. Though the guilt at causing worldwide devastation of untold scale might be a bit hard to bear.
      • Yep. Just say he simply missed when he was startled by the incoming cop.

• I'm not a fan of product placement in the first place, and it seemed especially asinine in this movie. Why, for instance, is there a jar of peanut butter randomly sitting on a shelf in an office? And why all the unnecessary zoom-ins on the car badges? It's like, "plot plot plot HEY LOOK A TOYOTA (or whatever the hell it was, I neither remember nor care)." Surely there are less intrusive (and let's face it, stupid) ways to work the product into the movie?

• Other ending question: The ending report clearly say the effect was mostly limited to the eastern seaboard. So, what about the rest of the world? Also, doesn't the big corporation win in the end? Everyone needs new surrogates, and since their plants are mostly automated and not run by surrogates, there's no reason they can't repair the damage.
  • Except maybe the billions of people who are going to sue their ass for allowing such a massive technical glitch to paralyze their products all over the world.

• How exactly do the people on the reservations get away with destroying an FBI surrogate who had a very legitimate reason for being there, harboring the fugitive he was after, and then playing the victim about it? Does the government have absolutely NO authority over them despite them still obviously being part of the US?
  • There's some talk about treaties which implies that these really aren't part of the rest of the country, anymore, which is, IMO, just one more heaping helping of implausibility on top of all the rest.
  • If they're independent, that's even worse. Assault on a foreign police agent is outright agression against the U.S., and it seems the Government would want to take any chance it could to reasimilate the settlement.
    • Who did they assault? They destroyed a machine. That is all. A machine that violated their sovereignty. Besides, the original comic mentions there are hundreds of these reservations throughout the world. You don't wanna piss off all of them over a destroyed surrie that can be replaced.
  • Considering that same surrie and his companion just crashed a freakin' helicopter in the middle of a densely-populated area full of for-real organic humans, I'd think the reservation-dwellers' outrage was about a lot more than just the fact there was a surrie walking around where it didn't belong.

• I just can't get past the central conceit. Yes, I realize that this is all just a giant metaphor for how we're all turning into couch potatoes and letting ourselves get sucked into our entertainments, and I'm pretty generous when it comes to suspending disbelief but, come on, the idea that 99% of the planet would voluntarily surrogate themselves 99% of the time, in a near future setting, no less, is just way too much for me to swallow.
  • For me, the premise suffers from what you're alluding with why people in this world choose surrogates.

I think it would have been more palpable if the back story included a prehistory of how humankind had derailed its own progress with genetic enhancements that backfired in subsequent generations that lead up to the one that relies on surrogates. The story could then be explained as taking place 300 years from now, but the reason the Surrogate World being featured looks like the early 21st Century is because it was at this time that humans had their "last hurrah" as regular people with everyday problems before the onslaught of revolutionary genetic engineering.

The writers could still use the same plot devices and hero figure with Bruce Willis, but this time his chance to recapture his humanity isn't so clear cut and cozy. He, as well as all other "puppet" humans would have to re-enter the real world as unplugged regular human beings much in the same vein as Robert Duvall's character at the end of THX-1138.

• If they all use surrogates except when they are eating or using the bathroom, why are all the real life people NOT morbidly obese? Bruce Willis is in at the ABSOLUTE WORST in average condition for a man of his age, and his wife is also incredibly thin. So these people who spend most of their lives sitting in a chair are perfectly healthy, yet that lady from the settlement who shot Willis' surrogate and had not used a surrogate for god knows how long is overweight. HOW DOES THAT WORK?!?!?!
  • Calm down. Some people are just skinny or fat regardless of their eating and exercise habits. Call it good genes. Alternatively, it's possible people who use surrogates use them so much they put off eating, so they'd get skinnier, sort of like how occasionally you'll hear about a Korean MMORPG player who starved to death. Meanwhile, non-surrogate users, like us, are always in their bodies, and given they're sort of exiles, don't have access to the same pastimes and entertainment, and may end up eating more because of it.
    • Truth in Television, poorer people often end up fat because they only have access to lower quality food (i.e. McDonald's). People without surrogates tended to be poor. But I would expect most everybody to be in much more horrible shape, since there's more to fitness than just weight. It's possible that Greer exercised with his real body once in a while since he doesn't seem to be so surrogate-obsessed (in the comic, at least). But like the above person said I'd wonder why there aren't bigger concerns about people starving to death or suffering other starvation-related damage.
      • Ironically, it's actually cheaper to cook your own food than to eat out all the time. I can buy a kilo of rice, some ham, and a 2-liter of soda for the cost of one Big Mac Combo.

• Home computers, which are vastly cheaper than Surrogates, and have proven value haven't managed to reach to 98% market saturation in the more 14 or so years that they have been widely available. Believing that an artificial body that serves no discernible purpose for the average person,just defies logic.
  • The artificial bodies do serve a purpose, at least in the comic. Because everybody's in an easily replaceable artificial body people are rarely ever in real danger. You don't have to worry about getting in a car crash or mugged or any of those other risks you take every time you leave your house. I'd also think that anybody who had enough money and was dissatisfied with their natural body (unattractive people, transgender people, etc.) would buy a surrogate. Those benefits change life on a whole different level than just getting a computer.

• If everyone is now "attractive" wouldn't ugly have been the new "pretty?"
  • No. Humans do have some biological guidelines to what attraction is, even if they vary and are influenced by culture. Being different looking doesn't make you automatically attractive, especially when everyone else is symmetrical, thin, with good skin, big bright eyes, and shiny hair. The Elephant Man wouldn't get laid at Chippendales.
    • But what about unconventional beauty and Chubby Chasers and the like?

• Here's what gets me. Quick rundown of the situation: nearly the entire human population decides to use robots via telepresence to live their lives, largely for safety reasons. Someone comes along, zaps the surrogates with some sort of electromegablaster, and it not only blows out the surrogate's eyes and CPU, it causes the user's eyes to burst and brains to turn to a bloody gray soup. The movie makes references to the blaster dealie being capable of bypassing the "failsafe," which is presumably the safety device that prevents the headsets and eye pieces from causing their brain to blow up under normal conditions. My question is this: why design the headsets (controllers) to have the capability of causing eye bursts and brain melts in the first place? Liquifying someone's brains is not likely to be just an unfortunate side effect of the technology, particularly since brain liquification is no easy task in the first place. The head pieces seem to operate the surrogates by receiving and translating a user's brainwaves, so that's probably not going to need a failsafe to prevent brain liquification. It's not entirely certain how the brain receives sensory input from the surrogate, of course; based on the devices, it's probably a combination of visual images, via the eye pieces, and possibly electrical impulses from the headset sent directly into the brain, but jeez...just how much electricity is needed to implant sensory input? Is it enough to potentially melt someone's brain and cause their eyeballs to burst without a failsafe in place?
  • The "failsafe" wasn't specifically a "prevent this from melting your brain" failsafe. It was a general failsafe, along the lines of, "Make sure that any damage to the surrogate doesn't feedback on the user." The whole point was that the weapon did something entirely unexpected and out of the ordinary.
    • Ah, true enough; the "failsafe" would, I suppose, block everything up to and including the whole issue with melted brains and popped eyeballs. Nevertheless, there is still the problem that the head and eye pieces shouldn't be able do that sort of physical damage to their user unless they were specifically designed with that capability. What's really being pointed out is that the plot of the movie relies on a variation of Explosive Instrumentation. This is combined with the general absence of an explanation for what sort of insubstantial energy or Applied Phlebotinum could travel through the airwaves (or whatever), make its way through a presumably electronic system, and cause the eye pieces and headset to somehow gain a lethal property they either didn't already have or shouldn't have been built with in the first place. Yes, I get that this problem was hand waved (or just ignored altogether) for the sake of moving the plot along; but this is, after all, a Just Bugs Me page.
      • This is a stupid movie invention. The original comic did not have this weapon. The attacker simply used a device that fries the surrie without harming the operator. Nobody actually wanted to kill 98% of the population (well, less, since the other half of the world would be sleeping), just shut down all the surries. Of course, it makes for less drama, so murder was added for the film.

• Others have touched on it but I'm going to state it outright. It's the all or nothing nature of Surrogate use. Not just the timeframe, which is unrealistic enough, but there are basically only three viewpoints portrayed in the movie. Surrogate for everything but eating and using the bathroom, Ludd Was Right and the computer tech who is viewed as an eccentric weirdo who avoids being a pariah because he possess valuable skills. There's no one who uses a Surrogate most of the time but occasionally likes to get out and engage in their hobby sans Surrogate, or alternately someone who spends most of their time au naturale but uses a Surrogate for things like extreme sports for safety/practicality reasons. Or to boil it down there are no shades of grey.

• Why would the military choose to have an endless Redshirt Army of Surrogates? Today, from what I gather, it costs something like $40,000 to train and outfit one infantry soldier. How much do Surrogates cost? A good deal more than that, I'm guessing. And you would still need to train the human soldiers, because Surrogates don't use weaponry and practice proper tactics on their own. The whole thing just doesn't seem remotely cost effective, although it would save lives--which is the emphasis of the entire purpose of Surrogates in the film.
  • Furthermore, why even fight a war on the ground if you have that level of robotics technology? We already have Predator drones. Surely those would become even more advanced Twenty Minutes Into the Future, so why even bother with infantry by that time?
  • While infantry might be cheaper to train than a surrogate, they're...disposable. You're thinking of surrogates as infantry themselves, instead of a force multiplier. If the surrogate gets shut down, just log into a new one. Again and again, until you take that hill. Admittedly, I haven't seen the movie.
    • That's pretty much the idea in the film. Also, if a Surrogate cost "a good deal more than" $40,000 a pop, then there's no flipping way that 90% of the population would have one, or that you'd be able to rent a replacement at any time at a corner store--as the previous poster mentioned, they're treated as disposable. They would have to be much, much, much cheaper than that for the premise of the movie to work at all.
    • Not to mention the military surrogates aren't exactly the most detailed in the face. It looks very cheap and plastic-y compared to a civilian one.
  • Estimates of the cost to deploy a single soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan range from $500,000 to over a million dollars per year. Plus, if that soldier gets injured or dies, then the government pays for a lifetime of health care or death benefits for the soldier's family. You can ship and house an entire platoon's worth of expendable surrogates in a shipping crate, they don't eat, don't get sick, don't feel fear, don't suffer PTSD, they're totally immune to biological/chemical/radiological attacks, and if one goes down there's always a replacement. Sounds cost-effective to me.

• So, what crime would Greer be convicted of? Vandalism? Sabotage? Gross criminal negligence?
  • All of the above.
  • Not quite. As explained above, nobody can convict him of anything, because nobody can testify with certainty that he wilfully caused the surrogates to be destroyed. For all the techie knew he just thought a bit too long and was about to hit Y, like every good citizen would, when he was shot by the cop. And the cop himself, of course, didn't know the surrogate was now moved by Greer, so he had no fault either. The blame would, most likely, go to Canter - who, of course, can't be arrested, what with being dead and all.
    • That's nice, except Greer said he was Greer just before he was about to hit the button, he damaged an FBI's surrogate in order to carry out his plan, while on camera and out of any surrogate, I imagine there would be some cameras in Canter's room in the first place...
      • He damaged a surrie who the techie can attest was a murderer, in the course of investigating a murder. Why would Canter have cameras in his own room, especially when it had the surries for The Prophet in there and there doesn't seem to have been anyone else going in in years? Even if there were cameras, Greer can still make up some plausible excuse, like a glitch, and all they'd show is him sitting in a chair.

• How did anyone know that Agent Peters surrogate was "rogue", which would lead to the need to send the equivalent of a SWAT team to the movie's version of Mr Universe? Seems that as long as a person's surrogate is functioning and the person themselves doesn't notify others of a bodyjacking, nobody really notices who controls whose surrogate because they're assumed to be secure. You could say one of the watchers in the hall of monitors noticed, but surely if they're monitoring by proxy (i.e. a simple surrogate being controlled by an off-site human) they would have noticed long before the Canter hijacked Agent Peters broke in and cuffed the Mr Universe character, plugged in the super-weapon (not sure how that would work either; it's a projectile, how can it also be a virus?!) and generally started tearing things asunder.