Review of Surrogates (2009) by Chads. — 26 Sep 2009

The right ending has a doppleganger, the happy ending, an unaware essence of story that puts everything in blissful order against the film's narrative organicity. Savvy moviegoers with a sixth sense(the right ending usually dies after a slew of rewrites and focus group scrutinization) can ferret out the right ending beneath the filmic posterity, which is why most major studio movies are often so unsatisfying.

"Surrogates", a dystopian sci-fi'er starring Bruce Willis and his Euro-trash robot, cheats, big time, because it forges an unfounded wrinkle in the diegetic guideline that holds dominion over the film's narrative.

The expediency behind the resolvability of conflict this time goes beyond formula and commercial considerations; this time, the happy ending renders everything which preceeded its self-correcting point in time, as nonsensical.

The weapon used against the surrogates, established at the outset as being capable of liquefying skulls while users sit in their sim-chairs, no longer has that same killing wherewithal when it matters most.

The eye-popping visual, as seen in the trailer(reminiscent of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening") is how "Surrogates" should end. During the climax, Willis' positioning of imminent heroism recalls the film-within-the-film in Robert Altman's "The Player", where he delivers the immortal line, "Traffic was a bitch," to a death row inmate(played by Julia Roberts), who he had just saved from a lethal injection in the nick of time.

(***SPOILER ALERT***) This time, Willis lets the hairy situation with cataclysmic implications run its due course without interference, which at the time seemed antithetical to his action star persona.

At the last second, we think, Tom Greer agreed with Canter(James Cromwell). But as it turns out, the FBI agent was basing his decision on an assumption about the weapon's effects on people that the filmmaker never bothers to set up.

Thanks to the customary eradication of the right ending by its doppleganger, Willis still gets to be the hero, albeit through the film's utter contempt for the concept of continuity.