Surrogates review/commentary thread

droidlvr · Post by **droidlvr** » Sat Sep 26, 2009 7:49 am

there were a couple of moments in the film where I was on the verge of pulling a Pee Wee Herman,

Almost fell out after reading that man!!! Thanks for your honesty dude. Now I know I must go see this flick.

rickdrat · Post by **rickdrat** » Sat Sep 26, 2009 7:50 am

Kishin wrote: there were a couple of moments in the film where I was on the verge of pulling a Pee Wee Herman

...and you don't want to get caught pulling your Pee Wee in a theater.

Thanks for the review, Kishin. I'm planning on screening this one myself sometime next week.

mrwankel78 · Post by **mrwankel78** » Sat Sep 26, 2009 10:58 am

thanks Kishin

MisterXYZ (RoboTomo) · Post by **MisterXYZ (RoboTomo)** » Sat Sep 26, 2009 12:03 pm

1/2

The movie is great. It loses points for very few female robots, but it gained more than that for the action packed buisness!

(What? I like a few action movies 'ere and there.)

rs5420 · Post by **rs5420** » Sat Sep 26, 2009 8:03 pm

Thanks for your truly excellent impressions on that new flick, Kishin!!!

code_author · Post by **code_author** » Sat Sep 26, 2009 10:04 pm

Thanks for the excellent review Kish, I'll be going this week coming up.

PsychoKirby · Post by **PsychoKirby** » Sun Sep 27, 2009 5:20 pm

Thanks for the review. It's clear you put a lot of thought into this. Would you recommend it to someone who's not big on action movies, though? Because I'm not, and if all it can offer me is ASFR I'll just wait for some vidcaps.

MisterXYZ (RoboTomo) · Post by **MisterXYZ (RoboTomo)** » Sun Sep 27, 2009 8:21 pm

I never said this about your review, but you make a very great point about "Surrogates".

I am very disappointed about this movie not being a box-office hit this opening weekend. It lost by $9.6 Million to "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs".

That Dreamworks movie has got nothing on Surrogates! This is a great movie, "Surrogates", I mean.

Thank you for the review!

jolshefsky · Post by **jolshefsky** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 5:37 am

In The Filthy Critic's review, he hated it. I'm not surprised and if it weren't for the robot women, I would probably hate it too (I'll wait for it to hit the 2nd-run theater by my girlfriend's house). I've watched much much worse movies for the specific purpose of the robot women.

PsychoKirby · Post by **PsychoKirby** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 9:00 am

MisterXYZ (RoboTomo) wrote: That Dreamworks movie has got nothing on Surrogates! This is a great movie, "Surrogates", I mean.

It's actually by Sony Animation. Sorry to nitpick, but I felt I should say it. At least you aren't one of those people who thinks every animated movie ever is Disney, though.

Anyway, thanks a lot for your thoughts, Kishin. I might see it this weekend.

zapped · Post by **zapped** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 4:43 pm

Can you elaborate on the people standing upright in harnesses on the sidewalks? Are they being re-charged in those booths? Is there more shown than just the two seen in the background of the preview clips?

Going to see this at 9:45 tonight and can't wait!

MisterXYZ (RoboTomo) · Post by **MisterXYZ (RoboTomo)** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 6:34 pm

PsychoKirby wrote:
MisterXYZ (RoboTomo) wrote: That Dreamworks movie has got nothing on Surrogates! This is a great movie, "Surrogates", I mean.
It's actually by Sony Animation. Sorry to nitpick, but I felt I should say it. At least you aren't one of those people who thinks every animated movie ever is Disney, though.

Anyway, thanks a lot for your thoughts, Kishin. I might see it this weekend.

My bad. I made a mistake.

zapped · Post by **zapped** » Mon Sep 28, 2009 9:04 pm

Very good movie and like Kishin said; Plenty of blank, deactivated stares. I found myself swallowing hard in my throat and mumbling, "Oh damn!" when the scene where they go to the pawn shop/second hand store came along. They were looking for a replacement surrogate body, and I believe that scene alone will go down in ASFR history. My only regret was that I didn't have the old pause button handy!

I will certainly be at best buy the day this comes out on DVD.

jolshefsky · Post by **jolshefsky** » Fri Nov 06, 2009 6:18 am

jolshefsky wrote:In The Filthy Critic's review, he hated it.

And I saw it last night. And I hated it. The movie itself had a plot so thin and pointless, I really should have just stayed home.

As for the ASFR content, for some reason it didn't do anything for me. I can spend any day finding pretty girls and pretending they are robots, and the movie is totally almost completely GINO. Bruce Willis' character, as a robot, gets pretty damaged, but not a single female surrogate is damaged. Well, except for the girl in the beginning, but it's really just her eyes being burned and broken.

The scene in the trailer with the face-off is exactly the same in the movie (there is nothing more: Greer's wife Maggie works in a surrogate salon of sorts and she takes a girl's face off to work on it; no casual smalltalk afterword or any more shots -- even though Maggie pauses her surrogate, leaving the customer sitting there with no face.)

In fact, every single scene featuring a female surrogate in some appealing way is shown in the trailer in its entirety. Except for the pawn shop, but by the time they get around to it in the film, it did nothing for me.

I did like that the surrogates don't tend to express emotion, so when the operator is upset or angry, their surrogate maintains a relatively neutral facial expression.

And there is a scene early-on with a landlady who's annoyed by her nearly useless "loaner surrey" while hers is in the shop; however, the CGI there is so bad, it might as well have been from Lawnmower Man. Basically she's got a face stuck on a robot head, and clumsy hands. The lighting on her face is frustratingly incongruous, and her clothing is right off the "business formless" page of the JC Penney catalog.

So my advice is to go in with very low expectations. If you use a lot of imagination, the movie can be ASFR. The mass deactivation scene at the end left me with some ideas (I'm sure there are still some working parts on all those bots ...), and the pretty people everywhere is okay, and the brief shots of charging stations are okay, and the surrogate freezes are okay. If any of those things is your kink, then this is totally your movie.

But if you're like me and want to see visual proof of a woman being a robot, the images and trailer is all there is in the whole movie (and there's not even a close-up of the cut-away robot woman like the promo still photo floating around). Starting from photos and the trailer, my imagination created a better fantasy than what was actually presented.

droidlvr · Post by **droidlvr** » Fri Nov 06, 2009 8:24 am

I for one thank you jolshefsky for your honest review of the movie.I downloaded this from the internet,didn't even reach the ending before deleting. Am I correct in my thinking that you reviewed 2040, ya know the movie I did pay for ?

Svengli · Post by **Svengli** » Fri Nov 06, 2009 6:06 pm

Hmm,

I can't imagine Hollywood will every make a Gynoid movie as good for me as the original Stepford Wives. But even that only has moments, albeit great moments.

I thought surrogates as a film fit the relatively common would-be-good-if-it-weren't-for-the-chase-scenes pattern.

I'm more a fan of robotishness than malfunctions/damage myself. Some of the images of the agent with his wife's surrogate were pretty good for me and scene of the female agent being killed and her surrogate hijacked was excellent for me.

But that shows that we're often looking for different things even within this fetish. Thank you.

Svengli · Post by **Svengli** » Fri Nov 06, 2009 6:15 pm

And ... while Surrogates is poor movie, I found reading "the filthy critic"'s lurid prose is at least twice as subjectively painful as watching the movie (fast forward is great..). If they'd pull the damn chase scenes, Surrogates would rank with something like Logan's run as a mediocre parable of the modern world. No scifi movie is logical, they're all metaphor for the present world. Not great but hardly deserves that kind of treatment.

Surrogates review/commentary thread

Re: Surrogates review/commentary thread

Filthy Critic (not surprisingly) hated it

Re: Filthy Critic (not surprisingly) hated it