Bruce Willis in his biggest role yet: playing two different versions of Bruce Willis. Now, i know there's a lot of Bruce Willis fans out there who think he's a great actor, to them i can only ask, "have you seen Armageddon?" I'm still pulling splinters from my eyes for that one, though admittedly it wasn't just Willis who gave them to me.
Surrogates, so i'm told, is based on a comic book series. I'm not surprised to learn this since hollywood's long since run out of original ideas. I swear this is the product of inbreeding, nepotism and "networking" that keeps the same talentless hacks employed perpetually while effectively stonewalling any new blood. But i'm just bitching now.
So, about the movie? Surrogates is a suspense-thriller, sci-fi, action type movie. Sci-fi because it's, ya know, robots, action 'cause there's some decent action and suspense because the entire driving element of the film is the solving of a crime and mystery before "bad things happen".
The movie juggles the three genres with varying levels of success. The action is mostly decent, the sci-fi is omnipresent and the suspense is, at times, simply thrown in to make the audience say "i didn't see that coming", with little or tenuous relevance to the plot. These aren't huge points and i openly admit i'm nit-picking, but i'm kind of sick of seeing "twists" thrown into stories just to make me go "wow" (which i seldom, if ever, do).
For the most part, though, i think the film is entertaining enough. The premise is that everyone, save a few thousand people, now has a "surrogate", a personal robot that they use to interact with the world while keeping insulated from perceived and actual dangers and hide in anonymity. Basically, it's like the internet of today, but with robots! This point is driven home in the opening sequences when a hot blond surrogate is revealed to be controlled by a fat, middle-aged white guy. Shocker, right?
The surrogates are said to protect their "operators" from any danger (as that is, indeed, their purpose), so naturally, it's not long into the film when an operator does in fact die and the chase is on to find the how and why. Enter Bruce Willis, a cop (always a cop) whose sense of justice naturally runs deeper than anyone elses. His job is to find out how this is even possible and catch and bring the criminal to justice.
While initially i was intrigued by the fact that a weapon could be used to kill an operator through a surrogate, somehow the film thought that this wasn't as interesting and the focus instead switched to "who built it" with the "how it was possible" being hand-waved away. I won't lie: this saddened me since the latter has a much more obvious answer. I won't tell you "the who", but i'm sure you can guess it without any clues at all.
I'll spare you all the details of the movie, but suffice it to say that Bruce Willis will solve all the problems and invariably learn along the way that life is much better experienced in person than through a compu... surrogate. Unfortunately the ending is nothing but a contrived coincidence and no amount of whiny fandom reasoning will convince me otherwise.
Ultimately, the movie's not bad. It very much is a dumb action movie, despite what it and its fans might say to the contrary. I give it 7 out of 10 surrogates. That's a (low) B. B for Bruce Bwillis. It's probably more of a 'D+', but that has no cleverness to it... just like Surrogates.
End of the Line
Now, i'd like to talk a bit about something else, if you'd allow me. I wrote this post not drunk on booze, as i usually am, but on pure anger. You see, every time i think i've seen the absolute epitome of human stupidity, some asshole, or more likely group of assholes, will invariably come along and prove me wrong.
My bank had recently moved to a new location and i was going there to beg... er, apply for work. While there i noticed something interesting. Usually, the line in front of the tellers is guided by velvet ropes and other throw-up barriers. This is because banks provide impossibly slow service and they need to regulate the line that will undoubtedly form.
I always hated these velvet rope thingies because if you came into a bank and no one was there, or worse, one or two people, you'd have to walk through this stupid little maze to get to the tellers. So imagine my surprise when i saw that instead of that, i noticed a mat on the ground that followed a specific path and had arrows on it instead.
"Huh," thought i, "that's pretty neat. It's less obtrusive and easier to navigate, but still conveys the idea of what should happen should the line get too long."
As i stood in a separate line waiting for service myself, the line slowly grew from the 2-3 people to about 15 or so. Unfortunately, as more and more people entered the bank, instead of following the obvious intent of the mat, they formed a simplistic, linear line that lead to, and crowded up, the entrance of the bank itself. Bea-fucking-utiful.
Now, you can concoct all the bullshit reasoning you want, there are two (and only two) reasons why this happened:
1) people are too fucking stupid to understand what arrows on a mat mean.
2) people are too fucking lazy to walk the extra few steps to form the line properly.
Any other reason you concoct i guarantee is covered by one of those reasons. Whether it be some BS about "pride" or whatever the fuck you're thinking, it's either stupidity or laziness. Period.
Now, you might be saying, "Tipz, you're getting worked up about nothing." To you i say, NO! I'm not getting worked up about "nothing," i'm getting worked up about the obvious stupidity of the human animal. Those stupid velvet roped mazes banks and others use to manage lines are a way to corral you and keep the unruly ignorant masses organized. They were designed because the banks felt they couldn't trust people to be smart enough to manage themselves with something as idiot-proof as "ordering" without fucking it up. Well, i guess they were right and when the bank does bring back the velvet rope maze, to the inconvenience and chagrin of us all, you knuckle-dragging douchebags will have only yourselves to blame and you'll know that i'm blaming you, too.
I know what you're thinking: did i go on that rant for nothing, or was it just for that stupid picture?
No comments:
Post a Comment