The Bruce Willis action flick opens with two murders -- the first in years in a quasi-present day Boston. Technology has advanced enough so that nearly everyone has a surrogate -- or "surry" for short. While reclining at home and plugged into a machine, people control a robotic version of themselves that safely maneuvers through the world in all of its slings and arrows.
The surrogates are a fantasy version of one's self -- cosmetically perfect, thinner, younger and sometimes of the opposite sex. (This means, most importantly, that we have a blond Bruce Willis on our hands.)
Yes, like James Bond, John McClane has gotten the Ken doll treatment. For an aging action star, the pseudo Willis is almost a pun, a wink at moviegoers' need for stars that never age.
Willis is an FBI agent named Greer who, along with his partner (Radha Mitchell), is trying to solve the murders which, though committed on surrogates, also "liquefied" the brains of their human operators.
The police, too, have surrogates. When Greer -- himself, not his doppelganger -- rolls out of his bedroom after a long night as himself, the attractive surrogate of his wife (Rosamund Pike) sighs at the sight of her bald and wrinkly husband.
The surrogates are a clear metaphor for the virtual reality that's already upon us. It's a subject popular in Hollywood these days, given the recent Gerard Butler film 'Gamer' and James Cameron's upcoming 'Avatar'.
