Surrogates Blu-ray Disc Review

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Surrogates Blu-ray Disc Review

By brenden ⋅ February 3, 2010 ⋅

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SURROGATES (2009, Blu-ray released January 26, 2010 - MSRP $39.99)

I had no expectations of Surrogates. I mean, I didn’t really care for the blown-out, hot-colour look of it, from what little I witnessed in the trailers but I was willing to give it a shot. And you know what? It’s not half bad if you’re in the mood for a simple, fast-paced sci-fi/action thriller.

Surrogates is an adaptation of the Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele comic book series of the same name, about a society of lazy dopes who have taken to living their lives through good-looking robot “surrogates”, controlled video-game style through brainwave interfaces from the comfort of their bedrooms. They never have to leave home. Hell, they don’t even have to get out of their pajamas! Just lay back and let the robots do their shopping, their jobs and all the social activity they could ever dream of. And speaking of socializing, much like online chatting today, you never really know who is on the other end of a surrogate. That young girl robot you’re chatting up at the club might just well be an overweight man in his fifties! Yeah, this is fairly predictable sci-fi fare. A kind of Philip K. Dick-lite story playing with the idea of the subjective nature of societal and personal identities. It’s not conceptually groundbreaking stuff but luckily for us it is the stuff of fun Hollywood adventure fare.

Director Jonathan Mostow delivers a fast paced 88-minute carnival ride of a film, with Bruce Willis turning in a weary yet hard-assed performance as a cop, busting back into real life to put the smack-down on the bad guys after his robot body bites the big one. The short running time keeps the film tight enough to keep you from cutting the plot to threads. And Willis fills every moment with enough charisma that he’s almost able to keep you from wondering why most of the other characters in the film are paper thin. But hey, you know what? In the era of two-hour-plus sci-fi concept-epics, it’s sometimes all right to kick back with a little bit of fun and Surrogates certainly fills the bill.

The Blu-ray disc is a tricky number. Technically, I think the visuals on this thing are pretty nice. It’s got everything you look for in a spiffy, modern transfer. But as a result of smoothing the features of the actors’ faces to make them appear as robotic surrogates (altering skin-tone, erasing wrinkles and pores) the transfer give the appearance of having digital noise reduction applied. This isn’t the case, as you can clearly tell from the grain structure of the images. But that won’t stop you from doing a double take when you’re watching the disc. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is out of this world, so crank the Surrogates Blu-ray up loud!

Mostow leads off the special features with an outstanding audio commentary. If you don’t love the film you won’t be very inclined to give it a listen but he’s got a lot to say and provides a fair amount of insight into the production. The 15-minute featurette ‘A More Perfect You: The Science of Surrogates‘ is a lot of fun, offering up production secrets while educating about the realities of modern robot science. I don’t think it will appeal to most but the real-world science content was honestly a highlight of the disc experience for me. The Blu-ray is rounded out with a featurette exploring the adaptation of the comic to the big screen, some deleted scenes and a really lame music video.